


Variations

by MaddyHughes, murakistags



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Bittersweet, Character Turned Into a Ghost, Episode: s03e03 Secondo, Father-Daughter Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Forgiveness, Gen, Hannibal in BSHCI, Murder Family, Post-Episode: s02e13 Mizumono, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Pre-Episode: s03e08 The Great Red Dragon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-04
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-08-12 23:17:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 22,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7953031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaddyHughes/pseuds/MaddyHughes, https://archiveofourown.org/users/murakistags/pseuds/murakistags
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Mizumono. Abigail is dead, but her life isn't over. </p><p>A series of interludes between Hannibal and Abigail's ghost, following the thread of his story, and hers, through series 3 and beyond.</p><p>Sometimes they make us cry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Egg

Hannibal in his kitchen, apron around his waist. With a deft flick of his wrist, he tosses an egg up into the air, catches it with the edge of a metal spatula. It falls, neatly sliced, into a bowl: yolk intact, two perfect halves of shell waiting to be picked out.

“Breakfast, Abigail?"

She looks up. “Yes please! …Especially if you're doing the cool tricks. You have to teach me one day, Hanni.”

"Gladly. Come here, stand in front of me."

Put your back to a killer? …Sure. And she does so with a little playful salute, too. She cranes her neck.

“Got it. And now?”

"Hold this spatula steady." He puts it in her hand, and holds his hand around hers. "Are you ready?"

She takes the spatula as instructed, holding it firmly along with him. A tiny smile creeps onto her face.

“I…think so.”

"Good. Hold the bowl in your other hand." He gives her the glass bowl, still helping her hold the spatula. In his other hand, he shows her the egg. "Watch the egg. It will show you where to go."

He tosses it in the air. Deft flick of wrist. “Watch the egg. Be the egg, Abigail."

She holds the bowl in one hand, wand…er, _spatula_ at the ready. And with a mild snort of amusement at Hannibal's words of wisdom, she manages to follow sight of the egg into the air, down, and then…barely catches a corner of it with the spatula.

The egg splits, some viscous liquid falling into the bowl below, but it teeters and eventually tumbles off as well.

Blinking down at the empty spatula and the squished egg in the bowl, Abigail can't help a small chuckle.

“…Oops.”

Hannibal only glances at the mess of egg. Instead he's watching her face: her concentration, and her amusement at her failure.

He says, with some urgency, what he has been wanting to say for some time: "I'm very proud of you, you know."

“Proud of me?”

She chuckles again and looks up at him, young face crinkling with mirth as the airy sound spreads. “I couldn't even get it right. Maybe save that pride for when I actually _can_.”

Her brows raise and she flashes a beaming smile up at Hannibal, the last notes of her voice fading to a quiet silence only interrupted by the clatter of heavy glass to granite.

The bowl slips from her fingertips, and by the time she's blinked in surprise to see it falling the short distance to the countertop, she herself is no more.

One brief blink of an eye, and she’s gone, and the room is that much colder.

The kitchen is empty.

It was always empty. Even the echoes aren't real.

Hannibal looks down at the bowl, the shattered messy egg, the failure he has created himself.

_Abigail coming willingly into his arms, standing with her back to the killer, dying shattered on the kitchen floor._

"I am proud of you," he says to her, even though she is dead. Even though he failed. "I am proud of you no matter what you do. I should have told you so."


	2. The Rain

Hannibal's whisper is lost to a void of silence; one that is so intensely quiet that it radiates with banging, deafening sounds in the mind. Abigail has moved away a long while ago to dust, no more than a spectre pattering along the halls of Hannibal Lecter's Memory Palace. Occasionally, Abigail comes to manifest in the present, but her words are only faded echoes there.

Around her, it smells like ash and thick, coppery blood. The heavy scent of wet soil seeps into the cool air as well, and before long a brisk shower of rain has come down from the sky. It's like a benediction, but far less forgiving with all of the frigid droplets plummeting down like little thumbtacks when they hit the skin.

As he walks across the square, Hannibal is safe and dry beneath his umbrella as water showers all around him. But Abigail is not safe at all, and every raindrop that hits her skin burns like fire, not unlike holy water upon a supposed bloodsucker. It sizzles into her pores, and by the time the sound of her splashing, pattering footsteps comes into reality, she is soaked to the bone and hazed with a preternatural steam around her.

She runs fast up from behind, her knees aching but never quite bringing her close enough until she feels on the verge of collapse. No wonder she cannot breathe– there's a gaping gash cross her neck that sports a gruesome smile of exposed trachea, sliced thyroid, stringy muscles wasting away to nothing in the shadows of the storm around her.

The rain washes away most of the blood, but still Abigail runs fast and hard to try and avoid the cool drops.She calls out when she's within earshot of the doctor.

“Hey! Wanna maybe share the umbrella? _Geez_!”

She sounds exasperated and like a teenager, breathy and weak with physical strain of her sprint. The words seem garbled by the storm, as weak as she feels when a trembling hand finally reaches out and takes a faint grip of Hannibal's forearm to pull herself closer, right up against his chest.

She may think she is hot from the small run, but in actuality her body is as cold as ice.

***

  
Hannibal’s splashing footsteps echo as he walks, underneath the sound made by the rain pattering on his umbrella. The rain falls in a solid sheet from the sky, erasing the façades of the Piazza della Signoria around him.

The weather was like this that night, when he came out without an umbrella, his shirt collar open, his face and hands covered in blood. He stood in the rain, that night, and thought of Lady Macbeth:

_“A little water clears us of this deed."_

She was wrong, of course. The blood on her hands stained her mind.

But that night, the rain washed the blood from Hannibal's hands, and his face, and Bedelia's shower did the rest.

Didn't it?

When he hears her voice, at first he thinks it's a bird, though what bird sings in a storm? Then he recognises her, and his instinct is to turn and wait for her as she runs to catch up with him.

He's not surprised to see that her throat is cut.

There's a beauty to it, of course. Anatomy of the throat, of breath and speech, food and drink, hormones and muscle and most of all, blood. But the rain has washed her clean.

He smiles down into her eyes which are still as blue as a sunny sky. His voice is gentle. "Are you cold, Abigail?"

She returns the smile and gently grips with both hands to his forearm holding the umbrella. Beneath the shade, she sniffles and attaches herself close to his side, tilting her head to brush away stringy, soaked strands of dark hair.

“A little, yeah,” she offers with a shrug, though her skin is prickly like jagged ice cubes shaved away for dessert. As she tugs them back into a walk, her bright eyes look up at Hannibal, curious.“Why are you out walking in this rain?”

He had an aim, a destination, but now he knows what his reason truly was. The tug in the gut that led him to walk. "So that I could meet with you, of course." He tucks her arm closer into his, as if his warmth could warm her.

“…Because you knew I'd steal some of your umbrella, huh?” she teases softly, tilting her head and leaning a touch closer.

Her gaze falls from him then, to instead look ahead through the thick curtain of rain falling around them. She quiets. “I don't like the rain that much,” she admits, voice distant and notably breathy past her tattered throat.

"Why is that?" He takes off his scarf and drapes it around her shoulders, careful not to disturb her wound. In exactly the same place where her real father wounded her, as if he had merely reopened it. Turned back time. Fulfilled a postponed-destiny. Hannibal is nothing if not accurate...and conscious of irony.

Craning her exposed neck to accept the scarf, Abigail allows it to warm her skin, but says nothing of it. Instead, her gaze focuses ahead still, her voice musing.

“Deer don't like rain when it's too heavy. They're hard to spot, and it's slippery to hunt. You could stand still for hours, soaking wet…and catch nothing but a cold. It's quiet.”

"Who are you, in this moment? The deer, or the hunter?"

“I'm with you,” she says, simply. But a moment passes, the heavy sound of rain filling a very heavy silence.“So I guess I'm the deer. Because my gun is too heavy to hold, now.”

"I would have liked to have hunted with you. Or is that something you associate purely with your father?"

“Not just my father, no. The hunting was my own; he was more like a fisherman with lure.” With a faint smile quirking her lips, she slows in her steps, enough to look up at Hannibal again. “You can't catch a deer with a knife, Hanni.”

He smiles down at her, genuine affection in his voice. "Did I ever catch you, Abigail? Or did you always elude me?"

“…That's assuming you were always the hunter, and I was always the deer.” She raises her brows, firmly staring up at him.

"No. Sometimes, you were the hunter, too. And I was the prey." He tilts his head. "Still, I wish we had hunted together."

“Pfftt. Yeah, right,” she scoffs softly, the sound muted by the rush of rain around them that doesn't ease at all. Though, Abigail is smiling when she looks ahead, and her hand falls suddenly from its grip on Hannibal's arm.

“Even between the hunter and the deer," she says, "there's always a winner to see who'll survive. You won. …How's it feel?”

With whom can one be truthful, if not with the dead?

He says, "Your blood doesn't wash off my hands. I feel...stained. But I would rather be stained than not to have known you at all."

“You saved my life,” Abigail says, and breaks away entirely.

With a graceful twirl, she leaves the shade of his umbrella, and finds herself bathing in the pouring, frigid rain again. Arms spread eagle as she puts distance between them, Abigail now has to shout to be heard over the storm, a loud crack of thunder booming across the hazy air. She's smiling, widely.

“That day in my parents' kitchen, you saved my life! I think the blood was fated to stain your hands, from then on!” She's suddenly yelling with force, storm loud and making her feel dizzily deaf, but still she twirls in the rain.

“I wasn't your deer, Hannibal! I wasn't even hunting you! I was your lure! I got you the one thing you wanted most!”

"You were the lure who was sacrificed," he says. “But I don't yet have what I most want.”

“What'd you say?!”

She yells across the space, the angry sound of pouring rain deafening in her ears as she pauses in her little twirls and spins in the frigid shower.

“I can't hear you!”

Again, she's yelling back to him with her blue lips. She's dancing in the rain, lighter on her feet than any deer.

"Come back!" he calls to her. "You're getting wet!" But she's dancing, spinning, farther and farther away.

"Come back, Abigail!"

She can't hear him. Or, rather, she doesn't want to. The air is so cold and welcoming and she's losing herself in it all.

“ _What_?!” she screams back just once more, her expression no longer one of amusement, but contorting into one young and distant.

It's hard to tell where the rain on her face ends, and where the sudden tears begin. Her lashes flutter in that way they always do, concern and confusion while she twirls. Her hand reaches out, takes the invisible hand of another while she faces Hannibal from yards ahead.

And instantly, like the flowing rain around them, she finds a release and falls face forward, head tilting back for the briefest of seconds. From the stringy, exposed muscles of her throat comes the trickle of thick blood, but when it dribbles to the concrete beneath her, it is nothing but a few fat crystalline raindrops.

Her body doesn't reach the ground, and instead dissolves to mist and rain just before contact with the slippery stone walk.

What's left in her wake is Hannibal's scarf, however, soaked with rainwater and left strewn limply across the flagstones like a felled snake, precisely positioned as how she wore it warmly across her shoulders just moments prior.

Nothing else.

He walks forward to where she fell, and crouches. Did he drop the scarf himself, halfway across the Piazza, and turn around in the rain to retrace his steps to retrieve it? That is the most realistic explanation.

But the scarf is in the shape of her slender shoulders, as if it embraced an invisible body.

He picks it up, limp and sodden in his hands, and though he doesn't speak aloud-—has he spoken _any_  of this aloud, a soliloquy in the rain?—he thinks the words again.

_Come back._


	3. The Chapel

The rainy afternoon becomes a quiet, sodden night. By morning, the entire earth is dry and fresh, renewed even by the heavy storm. But the air feels stale, not at all conducive to new beginnings, but instead a poor and painful imitation of the past.

But the day does pass. And so does another, yet another, and many more yet, as the earth continues to revolve and lives continue to be lived. Abigail does not continue to live, but instead has faded to nothing at all, only vaguely aware of her mind still more or less present. She's been too busy with much else, trying to patch and mend and make herself helpful even after the moment of death.

Abigail Hobbs comes to Will Graham in a dream, and she steps along Italian streets and laughs with him, she smiles so brightly and blinks back tears as the blood in her neck overflows right there at the altar of the Norman Chapel.

Will blinks and smiles, also fights back tears, but he loses his battle with sanity and loses his battle against being unforgiving. He's come this far, and now there's but a handful of steps and words left. A reunion is so close and yet so entirely distant.

Glancing backwards across the antechamber now, doors to the crypts remain ajar and frozen in place by the heaviness of wood and gold. Below is a maze of stone chambers only lit by the flow of lantern, a space intimate but cold and dangerous, and beautiful.

A man greying and looking distraught, hesitant, rises from the old cellar, and seems to be extremely cautious in checking over his own shoulders and glancing around every inch of the dimly lit space as he goes. The main church atrium is huge and yet not even an echo of sound can be heard in this type of silence once the man has shuffled his way hastily out of the entrance doors far down at the end of the seemingly endless rows of pews. 

Abigail knows that Will has gone below ground, deep into the recesses of the church with hope in his heart, forgiveness on his lips, realizations striking painful chords across his chest and throat. She remains above in the spaces proclaimed to be most holy, as if tethered tightly to move no further.  
  
The young woman's mint-blue eyes glimmer in the soft lighting, as beautiful in shade as the many different layers of stained glass windows that flank the seats and altar. The candle she holds in her hand, too, reflects warmly across her face, making her worries vanish and her cheeks seem more plump, eyes wider, expression more youthful than ever before. Around her neck is a chiffon scarf, at one time gifted to her by Hannibal. It is with a base of cream color, with a design of red tulips dotting along a brown tree branch spanning the entire length of the accessory. It is of the finest material, has a certain luxurious scent to it, and it is Abigail's favorite. Will did not comment on the fabric, and did not ask even in his dreams; Will had never seen her wear it before, not in her life.

She'd have worn it that night, to the airport and used it to tuck in her chin as she sat between two adoptive fathers upon the airplane headed to Europe. Fate did not allow her to wear it that night, and so Abigail wears it proudly now. On her slender body is a red petticoat jacket, buttoned and tied at the waist to combat the early spring chill that seems to permeate even the most insulated portions of the chapel. Beneath is a red sweater, then dark skinny jeans ending at her ankles where her short leather boots begin. Unlike usual, Abigail's hair holds a gentle breeze of loose curls, some very much reminiscent of Alana's occasional hairstyle. The long, wavy locks now shield her face from view as she dips down with the lit candle in hand.   
  
At the tile floor just anterior to the sprawling and decorative altar beyond, Abigail turns her gaze to the ceiling. Pinned up against the painted wall is a crucifix of dark-stained wood and gold. Upon it, Jesus is withering in the moments of his death, faced by Abigail. As the knees of her jeans sink down onto the hardness of the first marble step there, the wick of her candle flickers. Her head is bowed as she kneels before the altar, back hunched and posture quiet and still in supplication. She appears so very small in the belly of the giant church.

Is she praying there now…?   
  
Just behind her on the floor is a skull, severe, beautiful, timeless, graven in deep with varying tones of silver and maroon. Where it might look like a harbinger of death in this beautiful chapel, tonight even the skull seems to hang its head in quiet shame and respect. Not because of Hannibal's approach, but rather because of Abigail's solitude at the altar, her body left there and unmoving in the slightest, not even to breathe.

***

_“I forgive you.”_

The words in his ears, echoing in the crypt.

Hannibal walks quickly up the stairs to the chapel, leaving Will Graham behind him, underground with the dead. But Will Graham is alive.

This was Hannibal’s design: after all, the dead cannot forgive. And Will forgives him.

 Hannibal’s heart, normally calm and even, beats quickly. He could stay; could talk with Will. Could allow Will to find him. Find out what would happen. He is curious to see what Will will do. What he will do. After all these months, all this blood, the breaths they have taken and released apart. The betrayals, and whatever healing was possible.

_“I forgive you, Will. Do you forgive me?”_

_And then, in the darkness: “I forgive you.”_

He cannot speak. In this moment, he feels too much to speak. His heart torn from his body and placed into swords, dripping lifeblood on the white skull in the floor.

Hannibal emerges from the darkness into the light of the chapel, and although the light is dim and filtered through coloured ancient glass, flickering with candlelight, gleaming off gilt, it dazzles him for a moment with its brightness and beauty. The whole world blossoming into colour. 

_“I forgive you.”_

And then his eyes adjust and he sees the slender figure, clad in red, at the altar. She holds a candle, and gazes up at the broken body of Christ before he was raised from the dead.

His footsteps behind her are as silent as she is.

“Do you believe in God, Abigail?”

“I don't know,” she responds, the soft flutter of her breath flickering the flame atop the candle she holds tightly.

Abigail doesn't look towards Hannibal, but merely remains there kneeling and with gaze cast to the looming crucifixion. There's no smile in her voice, no lighthearted sarcasm or wit, no laughter or happiness to be found in any crevice of it. She is decidedly both distant and present in that moment, voice little more than a whisper weighed down by exhaustion.

“Do you?” she asks.

He follows her gaze to the suffering Christ. The wound in his side, the tears of blood on his face.

“I've always felt comforted by the thought that God does not care whether we believe in Him or not. That our suffering and our joy exist in the face of His glorious indifference.”

He glances at the candle in her hand. “And yet even here in this place of sublime beauty, we ask ourselves and each other if we believe.”

There is only a second’s pause before Abigail answers again, feeling suddenly very tearful:

“We believe only what we want to believe…only when it's convenient for us.”

Isn't that very idea how she managed to inspire Will from his hospital bed, to and from his home, from safety to the unknown, right across a roiling sea?

“So it doesn't matter,” she adds suddenly, as if the thought has just popped into her head to be blurted aloud. Shifting in her position, Abigail allows her head to fall forward, testing fate to not burn the stray strands of her hair with the flame of candle in her weak grasp. She can only sniffle softly, unwilling to let tears fall too soon.

Belief may not matter to God. But it matters to us. It built this chapel,” Hannibal says. And then, more gently: “It brought you here, did it not?”

He's right, and of course he is. For a split second there is immature anger in Abigail’s veins, vicious and hot at his words. But what she exudes is not anger, nor is it the firm surety she fakes. It is guarded, like her words and expression.

“Belief didn't bring me here,” she says. “ _I_ brought me here.”

She licks her lips, the heat of the candle having dried her skin.

Then she whispers in addition, more softly with hair shielding the sight of weak tears beginning to dribble down her cheeks: “Then I brought Will here.”

“Then he still believes in you,” he answers. Pain twists in Hannibal’s gut, in the same place he slid the knife into Will. It is so like a Will to follow a ghost, to cling to a vision. To keep a family he could not have.

But Hannibal is seeing the ghost now.

“I took advantage of that,” Abigail breathes.

Not only now, in having led Will to this place, but also when she hid a murder, his beneath Hannibal’s wings. The recollections are bitter, perfect with the salty taste of tears on her lips.

“Why did you come?” 

“…‘If everything that can happen, happens, then you can never really do the wrong thing.’ I'm just doing what I'm supposed to.”

As the lure, the bait, the girl saved from death only to be returned graciously to it again, after a time too, too short in the world. It tells on her now, now that she has seen Will. Her head may be tilted down to hide away, but the crying is now painfully pronounced. A fat tear nearly ousts the candle, a quiet sizzle filling her momentary silence. She sounds…far away.

“Will is not okay," she says. "He's already walking on eggshells here. If I leave, he’ll come apart entirely. But I'm already gone, and he doesn't understand that,” she explains. “…But you knew this would happen. That's why you took me from him. Because when he cracks all the way apart, he’ll need _you_ to fix it. You need him, to need you.”

“Yes.”

And this truth spoken like that now, moments after hearing Will offering him forgiveness, hours after leaving him his bent and broken heart…

“Yes,” Hannibal say, more quietly. “I do need that. I thought I could live without…him. I owe you a debt, Abigail. For all you have brought me.”

Suddenly at the back of Abigail’s mind it really does all make sense. The full echo in her ears is no longer an _‘We couldn't leave without you,’_ and instead an _‘_ **_I_ ** _couldn't leave without you.’_

Abigail is not that ‘I’ or ‘you.’

Granted they are all upon different levels of need and desire entirely, it doesn't make the wounds sting any less. In fact, it feels like her own tears drop down onto her neck, burn like fire across that jagged scar.

“It's easier for you this way,” she says. “You don't have to pay me a debt anymore. But Will is left picking up the guilt.”

Her mourning has made her tongue become almost as sharp, unforgiving as her mind. The tears won't stop, the hands holding that candle tremble, the fire threatens to fall to the tiles below.

“You're welcome,” she manages, a wet and thick voice. Then, impulsively:

“You said you were nothing like my father, and you lied. I trusted you, and I hate that, and I hate you.”

He bows his head, respecting her feelings, recognizing the truth of much of what she says.

“I never wanted to kill you. I made a place where we could be together. All three of us. Will’s betrayal made that impossible. But I understand your anger and your hatred. I could not keep you safe, or alive. I broke your trust. As your father did.”

He pauses, for the first time noticing her scarf: the pretty wisps of chiffon he gave her, covered with ephemeral spring flowers. “But you came willingly into my arms.”

Abigail mentally reminds herself of the truth, that she _doesn't_ hate him. She is upset, yes, but it is not permanent. It does nothing to lessen her anger and emotion, only fuel more of it. To hear Hannibal's voice exactly what she wanted to scream at him is no comfort. Like sprinkles of albumin in the blood, his words draw water from her eyes all the more.

“Then what could you _possibly_ owe me?” She is brash and doesn't regret it. Her shoulders may quake in silent sobs, and her face may be purposefully hidden, and she may be vocal, but Abigail still doesn't let it become too much. In all their minutes together in that chapel, she hasn't yet looked at him. She doesn't. Cannot.

“I walked into your arms because I loved you," she admits. It's a horrible confession now, all things considered, but Abigail won't lie, even if the truth isn't in her favor.

“A-And because this…this time…” Her words are a right mess, barely coherent. “…This time, W-Will didn't have a gun anymore. It was the o-only…only way to protect him, and…a-and keep you alive.”

He nods. She is right. It was the only way. She saved them both, at the expense of herself.

“And what I owe you is thanks. And belief.” He pauses. The word is not new, but it feel as if it is. “And love.”

“You're selfish. You don't…”

She continues to speak in her crying voice, but the church bells in the distance ring out with a roar across the open atrium. It echoes not too loudly, but even so it seems to muffle her voice away to nothing. It's as if she talks through a wad of cotton in her throat, meant to soak up the blood.

But unlike Jesus on the cross before her, Abigail will not rise again. Yet she remains in a position of supplication there, talking as her voice weaves in and out from what seems to be a vacuum.

“I couldn't………you would. I don't……… It was a mistake. ………my fault. I………trusted.”

The words alone make little sense, but at the very same time they do, ripe with jagged cries from her throat. Even she herself wonders what will happen when the clock finally strikes its final ring to mark the ninth hour. In the meantime, she just bends her head forward and hunches as if curling into herself, one hand hovering with that candle as if unsure whether to blow it out, or toss it to the wooden altar and watch everything go down in flames and smoke.

She is fading. And he cannot stay for much longer; Will will emerge, or the policeman will come back.

He stoops, as if that would help her hear him better, and he whispers with urgency: “Will _you_ forgive me, Abigail? For all I have done, and for what I was not able to do?”

When the bells toll with the ninth and final clang that resounds through the space, it rattles and dulls her words again.

“I………you.”

And, at that moment, she still does not look to him. Instead, she leans forward and finds herself crying all more in earnest, frail shoulders shaking beneath the softness of red coat and chiffon scarf, the mildly curled locks of her dark brown hair. It's almost as if she won't say or do anything else, that she'll just curl into berserk and fade into the decorative tiles of the floor, never to be return. But the scene is dim and haunting, her body only illuminated by the candle, the flecks of orange light desperate to carry on soaking in the air that carries her weak, tearful voice one last time:

“I forgive you.”

Then…she is gone. With the last ambient echo of the church bell silent, the candle slips from her fingertips and falls to the tile. The flame remains lit for a moment, but rolls and hits the edge of a step and is cut off fading to nothing but a burnt wick and a tendril of white smoke. Abigail had fallen forward on her knees to the altar…and is no no more tangible than any shadow creeping across the large space.

As the lingering smell of smoke drifts up into the air, Will too begins to ascend from the catacombs below.

Abigail has left, and now it is Hannibal’s turn to leave this holy ground and haunted space, walk away and not look back on the two pardons he's received in the presence of this God, in whom he believes and does not believe.


	4. The Waltz

There's a certain inevitability in a waltz. From the very first notes, it marches onwards, trippingly, ploddingly, whimsy or pattern, in steps of three, measure to measure to a climax and conclusion.

It is a dance made for two.

In a room crowded with people, it divides into couples, and their movements into three-four time. A mathematical formula. Its ending inherent in its beginning.

This waltz is more whimsical than most. It shifts from a major key to a minor accidental, from bombastic to delicate, exuberant to contemplative. But it is inevitable. It is inescapable. It has its own logic and its own momentum.

Hannibal plays after Bedelia has left the room. He thinks about the very first notes that were struck when he met Will. The tempo and the mood that were set: the actions and thoughts that were put into motion.

_"Betrayal and forgiveness are best seen as something akin to falling in love."_

Hannibal plays, without thinking of the music, the same waltz again and again. His mind is elsewhere. And the slender figure beside him on the piano bench could have been there for a mere moment...or for the entire space of a song.

Abigail drinks in the music with pleasure. It's hard to tell that she's enjoying it at all by the guarded expression on her face, lips taut and brows mildly furrowed, but she truly is enjoying the tune.

It's not a piece with which she is particularly familiar, but all the same it's one that suits Hannibal well. A waltz, a piece of music lilting and breezy with accents of jubilee, but equally tiring and thick. Even the little bits of sostenuto are lovely, crafted to perfection by a combination of Hannibal's skilled fingers across the ivory and ebony keys, and the press of foot to the bronze pedal beneath the belly of the piano.

Sitting there, Abigail feels distinctly detached from the moment…until she breaks her own little spell. By the third time around that Hannibal has played the very same waltz, Abigail is distinctly aware that he's lost in thought. There are creases of a hidden frown just above his brow, age in grey hairs at his temples, and suddenly his face in profile looks far more haggard than what she is used to. Time and circumstance is beginning to tell on him, and even though his own path is consciously paved by his own actions, Abigail feels anguish crush around her unbeating heart, tight and hot and deserving of tears that do not fall.

Reaching out, she suddenly presses a slender, pallid fingertip to one key. A note of C, two octaves below the center, that starting note for the first major scale, the white key to begin the rest, nestled just to the left of a pair of black keys. Hannibal sits at her right on the bench, with easier reach to all the higher octaves than she. Perhaps it is ironic, perhaps not. That singular note plays out in the middle of his waltz, interrupting the perfect measures of music.

After observing for two rounds of this, Abigail can at least offer a bit of music of her own, of the very same nature. The C first, then a third to a lower E, and then onwards. Unfurling her one hand, her other fingers join upon the keys, and Abigail blinks in concentration, quietly mimicking the main melody of the waltz he plays.

With the exception of missing perhaps one note, she plays a trill flawlessly, improvising where she can, and adding to the melody Hannibal plays right beside her. Her second hand comes up and adds as well, a low and shivering bass line beneath the higher, flowery notes. She had a wonderful private teacher back in Baltimore, after all.

Despite the music, now for four hands instead of two, he doesn't perceive her for some time. The thread of the music is the thread of his own thoughts, and his thoughts are both dark and light, tripping and plodding. It's not until the piece ends that he realises, by silence, what has been added to his playing.

He looks up and his eyes focus on Abigail. It seems entirely natural to him, even if he had not seen her before. Her presence is a passage in his thought.

"Do you think I should have eaten you, Abigail?"

When they stop playing, her slender fingers remain poised above the keys, minty gaze focused down at her fingernails. Gently she presses two keys, and then another two, the beginning of the very same waltz melody again…but then she holds them down, allows the chimes to fade into a warm silence. Removing her hands to her lap, Abigail tilts her head, a curtain of brown hair falling down over her scarf and sweater. Looking closely into every little corner of Hannibal's expression, she speaks in a hushed tone, a mimic of her father:

“‘Eating them is honoring them. Otherwise…it's just murder.’”

Not exactly an answer to his shiver-inducing question, but not entirely a hedge from it either. Merely a statement of fact.

He plays a soft chord: A minor. "It's never just murder."

The single minor chord feels like a little despairing cloud settling into the space. But when that fog clears and the notes fizzle out, Abigail's resolve is as clear as the look in her bright eyes. “Motive doesn't make it any less of a murder.”

"What if the motive is love?"

“…That proves my point all the more.”

She answers simply, fingers folding together on her lap as her gaze averts from him.

"I love him,” Hannibal says. “Were you aware of it?"

“…You have this veil over you, but you're not as shielded as you might think, to those who care to look deep enough.” She is maybe one of those who cared to look deep enough. When all is said and done, she is also one to not regret any of it.

The moment is somewhat lightened by her elbow nudging the side of Hannibal's arm. “I could see it. It's cute.”

 _Cute._ A shadow of a smile touches his lips. That is not the word Bedelia would use to describe it.

"Is he aware of it?" he asks.

“…Oh, come on, now. That's cheating,” she guffaws softly, turning her head with a playfully stern purse of her lips at him. “What fun would it be if I told you all that I can see? You've come this far to figure it out on your own.”

Then softer, but with no less teasing: “For an acclaimed psychiatrist, you're a little stunted in this department.”

This time, the smile is definite. It takes years from his face. "You're right. I shouldn't seek advice about romance from a teenager." An arpeggio to punctuate his words.

“From a teenager who's never been in love,” she says, pointedly giving him another nudge. The soft piano notes make her voice sober just enough to place a warm smile across her lips, eyes admiring the way Hannibal's eyes crinkle with beautiful mirth. “But as less of a teenager, and more of your daughter…take my advice when I say _go for it_. Let him love you, too.”

“Your advice differs from my psychiatrist’s."

“You mean Bedelia? She's pretty, but at the core kind of a bitc—”

She stops speaking just in time, fingers tightly curling.

“I don't like her, I wouldn't mind punching her in the face…but all bias aside, maybe you should stop listening to her.”

“I will. One day, I will kill her. As I killed you. Does that disturb you, or comfort you?"

“Comfort. Because that will mean that you're not listening to her advice. And maybe instead listening to mine,” she smiles.

Absently, he plays a phrase of the Satie waltz. "On the contrary: I'm quite capable of listening to the advice of someone I have killed."

“Is that why I'm here?”

Abigail asks softly, knuckles white as fingers curl into her palms, nails leaving marks. For a handful of seconds she admires the waltz, then adds: “Am I here to help you, then? With advice?”

"What we imagine, is real to us. Thoughts and memories have weight and meaning, beyond the confines of our brains." He continues playing. "You may be a figment of my imagination. You may be a spirit walking the earth. Either way, Abigail: you exist. And that means you may be here for several purposes, at once."

He glances at her as he plays. "Why do you feel you are here?"

She takes a second to contemplate his words and question, to compile her thoughts on all of it. “I think I'm here because you need me,” Abigail says, quiet but honest. “And because I need you. I'm here also because…I'm angry. Bitter. Hateful. …Of the circumstances.”

She licks her lips, takes a very quiet shuddering breath and looks upwards at Hannibal's face in profile.

“Not hateful of you. I don't hate you, by the way,” she whispers, suddenly afraid to speak louder. “I was upset when I said that, but I didn't mean it. Maybe I'm angry, but I don't hate you.”

"Hate and love are the same emotion. I would not judge you for feeling one, any more than I would judge you for feeling the other. You have always been free, Abigail, to feel exactly as you liked. If not to act so."

He smiles, rather sadly. "I have had more to do with—not hate, precisely, but—contempt, than with love. So has Will. Love is a stranger. It is difficult to recognise a stranger, when it comes in the guise of something more familiar."

He looks down at her: slender and delicate, her hands like fragile wings on the keys. "I was a stranger to you,” he adds. “Yet you trusted me. And loved me. And I loved you."“

“I acted as I wanted to, I guess. …Nobody to blame but myself for whatever came after my decisions. Also, it was nice to have a few hours of the day without you around, where I could cry freely,” she admits without hesitation, the pads of her slender fingers dancing across a few keys in a soft, brief melody. The bit comes to a silence when she takes in his words with thoughtful gaze directed at her own hands.

“Is love still so much of a stranger? …Between you and Will?” She sounds almost young then. _Would_ seem young were it not for the nature of her next whispered words. “To be fair…there's no better way to establish some form of trust than to help someone hide a dead body, and lie about it.”

“Yes. That’s exactly the tactic that Will took, with me. He gained my trust with murder…a real one, and a false one. Perhaps that’s one definition of love: mutual manipulation.” A minor chord. “To be honest, I don’t know whether Will feels more of love or of hate. I suspect he doesn’t know, either."

“‘Mutual manipulation’ doesn't sound nearly as romantic, but…guess it's a serial killer thing,” she shrugs, casual but not dismissive. Her fingers rest stop the keys then, unmoving even as Hannibal's own do.“You just said that love and hate are the same emotion. You answered your own question: Will loves you very much.”

"'My only love sprung from my only hate! Too early seen unknown, and known too late!'" A trill of notes to accentuate-the quotation. "Is he very unhappy? Has he been very unhappy?"

Abigail allows a very soft chuckle to pass her lips, one more tired than amused. As the notes ring out, she answers.

“He's grumpy. …But he's always grumpy, especially without his dogs. …And now without his psychiatrist. And also…now without his friend. I think anybody would be unhappy like that, lonely and in search of someone they don't think they deserve to have anymore.”

"Yes. Anyone would." There's sadness in his words, and yearning, which make it clear he is not only talking about Will.

The small fingers from atop the piano keys suddenly close gently onto Hannibal's forearm, the touch positively frigid. “Let him come find you. And don't hurt him. The only way either of you will survive is with one another, anyway.”

"The first is inevitable. It is already put into motion. The second...that may also be fixed, or it may not. A great deal depends upon what Will does." A single note. "A great deal has always depended upon what Will does."

“Because you're so unpredictable,” she challenges quietly. Abigail suddenly leans her head back and exhales deeply, a huff and an exasperated sigh.

“Why are you two so damn _difficult_? Can't you sit down over non-people coffee and just _talk_?”

He smiles. It's easier to be direct with a ghost, and this one is as charming as she could be in life. "Thus speaks the teenager who, by her own confession, has never been in love."

Touché. She rolls her eyes and tucks one leg under a thigh, turning on the piano bench to face him more fully now.

“Yeah, but I like to think the easiest way to figuring anything out is to be honest and open about it. To talk about it.…I mean, I also think my version of love would be less knives and guns and stabbings, and more kisses and hugs. But _hey_ ,not judging you or Will. To each their own. And you're into some kinky weird stuff anyway.” She shrugs, holds up her palms as if in surrender.

"Don't be rude, Abigail." But it's mild, with no reprimand in it. A ghost can appear where she likes, and when; Abigail may have witnessed almost anything that has occurred in the months since her death, and who knows what's classed as "kinky weird stuff" by modern teenagers? Perhaps this is another clue as to why she dislikes Bedelia…

“…Fine,” she murmurs, elbows locked with hands resting on her calf atop the bench. Her bright blue eyes don't move her gaze from him, though she's less staring as she's just…comfortable. It's one of the mildest scenes she's seen all this time anyway, and she's _in_ it. Talking to Hannibal like she isn't long gone from existence.

"Do you say these things to Will?" he asks.

“…Nope. I don't,” she answers honestly. “After nudging him to the chapel, he was hallucinating something bad. Thought I was  _really_ sitting there with him. With me, Will doesn't exactly know where to draw the line between reality and his mind. It scared the hell out of me to see him so shaken. I think I need to keep my distance, or he'll just keep clinging to some false hope that I'm not only in his dreams. I can talk to you, because you're…well, let's go with ‘mentally stable.’”

He smiles at the description. Again...not one that his psychiatrist would use.

"Some say love is madness."

“…All right, so you're a little insane.” She finds her lips twitching up into a grin, only encouraged by his smile. Leaning in, she tilts her head and rests her temple on his shoulder, tone light. “The best of us are, though, right?”

"Sometimes insanity is the only sane response to the world." He tilts his own head so that his chin is resting lightly on the top of her head. Ghost or not, he can smell her apple shampoo.

"'If everything that can happen, happens'...” he says, “does that mean that in some universe, Will and I live together happily ever after?"

She feels comforted like this, strangely enough. She didn't know she needed to feel comforted.

“I hope that universe is this one,” she says. “Both of you deserve it by now.”

"If time can reverse itself. If the things we have done, we can undo. If forgiveness has a form. Then...then perhaps that universe is this one."

“…‘Time did reverse,’” she recites from memory, the last few words in her living mind that were ever heard.“‘The teacup that I shattered did come together.’” Abigail breathes softly, reaching out to play a minor flicker of melody with three piano keys, while she still leans softly against his warm skin. “‘A place was made for Abigail in your world. For all of us. …Do you understand?’”

A pause, another somber three notes at the left end of the piano.

“‘I let you know me. _See_ me. I gave you a rare gift.’” She speaks so softly and easily, that it's as if the words are her own, ingrained in the forefront of her mind.“…‘Fate and circumstance have returned us to this moment when the teacup shatters. I forgive you, Will.…Will you forgive me?’”

A long pause, then, softer: “He forgave you. That's more than enough to reverse time. … _Again_.”

 _Which is greater?_ Hannibal wonders. _The pain of loss, or the pain of hope?_

He inclines his head and presses a soft kiss against her cold forehead. He remembers the times he held her, in his kitchen. When he gave her comfort and death.

"If time does reverse itself. If the teacup comes together again, and Will and I are together. Will you come back, and join us?"

The kiss on her forehead is so warm and gentle, reminiscent of the times he'd held her petite body to his chest, tucked her into his strong arms while whispering words of comfort against her dark hair. Beautiful memories that she cherishes. She leans all the more closer then, fingers falling away from the keys as she too leans up, presses a chaste and cold kiss against his smooth cheek, and whispers:

“I can't promise that, but I'll try.”

And suddenly her body against him is weightless, like fluffy cotton pressed against wounds that are only beneath the surface. Before she fades, she whispers quietly and with a longing in her voice, right close to his cheek where touch of her kiss lingers.

“Play the Goldberg Variations for me…? That's my favorite.” And she is gone.

Hannibal closes his eyes, and without looking, he plays. This time, for her.


	5. The Cell

Hannibal is sleeping, and that is when Abigail comes into his cell.

It's a glass cage, a horrific one at that, and as she stands there in perfect silence and looks around at the four walls and the ceiling far above, she feels decidedly ill, sick to her stomach. This is not how it was supposed to be. No no, it's all _wrong_. Hannibal can't be in here, he can't be…

But there he is in the dim room. She watches him sleep quietly, can see the peaks of greying hair at his roots, the fringes of his slick bangs cut shorter than usual above his forehead. The wrinkles on his face are smooth in sleep, but he looks so… _tired_. He's wearing that grey jumpsuit, no shoes as he sleeps on a cot hard and uncomfortable, a blanket thin as a sheet of paper to shield him against the cold and recycled air.

It feels disgusting to her, and though this is the same man she knows, it seems so different. As if something has shifted. It makes her immediately start tearing up, try to sniffle away tears as she kneels to the floor by his little cot, and raises a small hand to gently stroke through his hair. She can't look at him but she can't look away. Hot tears dribbling down to soak into the arm of his jumper that lies still by his side, Abigail whispers thickly and shakily, voice low and nasal with the unexpected onslaught of salty tears.  
  
“Why are you here? You shouldn't be here,” she whispers, unable to help herself as she then presses lips tightly together to prevent a louder sound.  
  
“T-They know,” she adds a moment later, shaking as she fights back audible sobs. “They know everything, Hannibal. Why do they know, _why_ did you…?”  
  
It's more to comfort herself than anything else now, her kneeling there and crying quietly in the dim cell in the dead of night, her hand continuously carding through his hair, nails gently grazing his scalp again and again.

***

The most insidious deprivation of incarceration is not what you would expect.

The food...is survivable. Fresh air and a view, though a terrible lack, are at least supplied by the powers of Hannibal’s own mind, which can call up with detail every landscape and cityscape which he has seen, in the flesh or in art. The blank walls of his cell easily become Venice or Budapest...or the quiet snow-bound fields of Wolf Trap, Virginia...or the interior of his own kitchen in Baltimore. Hannibal is amused by his jailers’ lack of imagination in forbidding him sharp implements, shoe laces, a belt, paperclips. He could wish for a toilet seat, a bath...but these are luxuries. He is allowed music, and books, and the space of his own mind if the former two are taken from him.

He is not lacking conversation. There’s an endless stream of doctors, students, lawyers, curiosity-seekers, journalists, all eager to line up and be played with, in the flesh and through correspondence. Dr. Lecter hardly played host to more people when he was a free man...though of course the food and wine were better then. 

No. What he truly misses is none of these things.

It is human touch.

Whenever he is in reach of another person, he is handcuffed and masked. The orderlies touch him as if he were not a human being, but an object. A weapon. He is manacled and put into a straitjacket to have his hair cut. By mutual accord, he performs his own state-mandated physicals upon himself.

Alana Bloom, once so intimate, comes no closer than a thick sheet of safety glass allows. Even before his guilty verdict, a foregone conclusion, his own lawyer was not permitted to shake his hand.

We are made real in this world by the touches of other people. Hannibal Lecter is a physician, an artist, a killer. He has learned of the universe and shaped it by the sensation of his hands upon flesh. He has been tender, cruel, healing, pleasure-giving, curious, brutal.

He is allowed none of that, now. 

The last truly human touch which he has experienced was when he cared for Will Graham after their escape from Muskrat Farm. When he undressed him, and washed him, and tended to his wounds. Dressed him again, and tucked him into bed like a child or a lover. Although he was neither.

If Hannibal had known, then, what absence of touch would inhabit his days, would he have performed these tasks more slowly, or with more care? Would he have taken Will’s hand, unconscious as he was, and rested it, for one moment only, upon his own cheek?

He tries not to think of that. Tries to only savour the memory. The last time he was made human, not a ghost of a monster behind bars.

Many prisoners spend a great deal of time sleeping; it is their escape, and of course they are depressed. Hannibal prefers to be awake. His escape is more complete and more controlled, then. He can think of other things than what he misses.

But in his sleep, his mind is sublimated by what he has lost. In sleep he thinks of that hand stroking his cheek. He thinks of the sun on water and the soft kiss of a child. He thinks of peeling away skin to find hot slippery life pulsing beneath. Gentle sleep breathing on his neck. A dying struggle, understanding written in the eyes beneath him.

And fingers combing through his hair. As his mother did to soothe him to sleep, all those years ago, in another country, both of them unaware of what and why he would become.

Hannibal breathes out slowly. Touch is here and now. It forms us into reality. It makes us human. And lack of touch makes us…

He opens his eyes. 

***

Abigail’s tears have died down to only a few droplets every minute. And she almost feels guilty about waking him up...if she did at all. It’s only very early in the morning, before dawn when the sky is dark above and one might still consider it to be the dead of night. Most people are asleep here. Then again, most dead people are dead, too.

Abigail sniffles and uses free hand to hastily brush at her young face pink-cheeked and streaked with tears, her other fingers still carding softly through Hannibal’s hair, forearm cradling half of his face. She leans closer, stares down at him quietly, kneels there and stops her hand with palm against his cheek, fingers splayed into his hair. Tone apologetic, sheepish, she whispers, “Sorry if I woke you up.”

Hannibal stares at her, halfway between dream and waking, not yet fully human.

“Who is the ghost?” he whispers. “You or me?”

She finds no comfort at all just then, sniffling. Hannibal’s words are more frigid than her dead skin.

“... _Me_ ,” she upholds firmly.

Hannibal’s eyes focus. It is never truly dark in the cells; darkness affords too much privacy. Slowly, he disengages himself from her and sits up. But he keeps her hand in his. The human contact, even with ghostly cold skin, is precious.

“Abigail,” he says, and free from sleep, his voice has a certain new detachment. “I haven’t seen you in a long time.”

God...he sounds as tired and dull as he looks now. Still kneeling there quietly, Abigail holds onto his hand, her eyes staring up at him with unabashed worry. 

“Maybe _too_ long.” She barely represses a scoff, one less at him as it is at his surroundings and circumstances. “I look away for a little while and the next thing I know, your face is all over the news? And here you are.”

She doesn’t even wait for his response before adding: “I’m pretty pissed. Like, cry-worthy. As I’ve been doing. Not at you, but at _this_.” With that last word, she uses her free hand to point at the rest of the glass cell behind her.

He glances around the dimmed cell, in the manner of one who has not examined it before. “As cells go, it isn’t bad. I have considerate keepers. It helps when one’s jailers are in one’s debt.”

Alana. Of course. 

“Not the point,” Abigail says with a deep inhale. “I meant the fact that you’re here at all. You shouldn’t be.”

“I’m partly here because of you, Abigail. Your murder was the first of which I was convicted, in fact.” Hannibal tilts his head. His eyes grow cold. “It was the only one for which there were direct witnesses.”

His words feel like knives, and Abigail isn’t entirely sure they aren’t meant to feel that way. It makes her steel herself, rise from her kneel, stomach instantly in a knot.

“Ooookay,” she breathes, eyes blinking as she stands and stares down at Hannibal. “...I-If you’re trying to make be feel bad, I already do. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but you can’t blame _me_.”

“I don’t blame you. I chose to be here.”

“......”

The urge to cup hands against her face and rub until her skin is red and raw is so tempting. But Abigail doesn’t.

“...Will. Will did this.” She takes a few agitated steps to the side, her version of pensive pacing.

“No. Will wanted me gone,” Hannibal says. The words taste bitter. “I turned myself in.”

“What?” She blinks, expression morphing from a quiet upset to disbelief. She gestures to Hannibal with both hands. “...You’re crazy. You’re actually crazy-- that is the most irrational decision-- prison-- you’re facing the _death penalty_. This is not…”

She sucks in a deep breath, holds it, huffs slowly. “Loaded question, but: are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” But his voice is still cold. “As you said: I’m actually crazy. The insane are safe from the death penalty.”

“You’re not--...okay. You know what I mean. That’s different. You _have_ to plead insanity. But you’re...ya’know…”

Abigail has no idea what the hell she’s even saying anymore. She’s off-kilter, everything is. It all feels so wrong.

“You’re not fine. Look at you,” she says, perhaps a bit too caustically for her own tastes. She winces, quiets, and steps closer to hunch before before where Hannibal stares with dull eyes, to look up at him. “Have you talked to Will? Maybe...maybe he can fix this. Maybe...I don’t know. I’m just officially worried. You’re...not you.”

“Will.” The name is resonant with emotion: too many to name. “Will knows where I am. That’s why I turned myself in. So he would always know exactly where to find me.”

Hannibal looks down at her. “And he will find me. We spoke of faith, Abigail. I have faith in him. We are too alike to be forever apart.” He presses his lips together. “Or at least...I have faith in his curiosity.”

If it hurts Abigail like this...she simply can’t imagine the pain it causes Hannibal. But as always he is well-kept, together. It’s not manifested in coldness and bitter tones, but still she knows it barely scratches the surface. She knows Hannibal too well to think otherwise at this point. It’s she who takes his hands now, both of them into her own, holding tight as if to offer warmth even when her fingers are icy.

“Do you know what Will said, once? I shouldn’t tell you, but I’m gonna anyway.” Licking her lips, Abigail pauses and looks up at Hannibal, her own gaze far, far away for that moment. “‘I’ve never known myself as well as I know myself when I’m with him.’” 

She can still hear the echo of words in the warm night wind of rural Lithuania. “...When he was looking for you, he said that. Sitting inside of your home, in Lithuania, and said that. To Chiyoh. And he meant it.” Abigail gives his hands a squeeze, the the strength she does not have in her body any longer. “It’s not curiosity. You’re right about the faith. He’ll come back. I know he’ll come back-- he wouldn’t leave you here.”

“He isn’t ready to know himself," says Hannibal. "But he will be, one day.”

“He knows he needs you for that,” she says, staring up at the doctor all the while.

Hannibal takes a deep breath. He has not allowed himself to feel this much for a long time. Not for years: step out of the guise of the amused and powerful puppet-master in the cage, and probe delicate instruments around the ragged edges of his loneliness. The surgeon to his own wound.

“Did we speak of a fairytale ending, the last time we met?” he asks.

 Abigail continues to crouch, her hands holding his own tightly, her mind feeling suddenly very hazy at all the uncertainties of what’s to come. 

“...Yeah, we did,” she answers, her offered smile faint but genuine for all it’s worth. “As far as fairytales go, I think Will is supposed to be the knight meant to come save you from this place.”

Hannibal’s smile back is weary. “Will Graham’s instinct is to save the innocent. As it was with you. He’ll find me not to save me, but to save others.”

“You’re not a means to an end, Hannibal,” she shakes her head of dark hair, just slightly. “Maybe he’ll come because you _are_ the end.” 

“You’re very optimistic. For a dead person.”

“Not like I’ve got much else to live for.” _Ba-dum-tiss._ “...Besides, someone has to be. I hate knowing who you were before this, and now seeing you here in this. I’m optimistic the Chesapeake Ripper wasn’t meant to sit in prison for the rest of his life.”

“I won’t. I have agency in the world, Abigail. Filaments running out from here to a thousand places and when each of those threads is touched, I feel it. I won’t be in here forever. And I will see Will Graham again.”

In the dark, talking to a ghost, however, Hannibal’s actual words are more optimistic than his tone. If her touch makes him more human, it also makes him more lonely.

“...Good. Good, that’s…” Great. Optimistic. More than she was expecting, but...this still isn’t it. This isn’t Hannibal Lecter as she knows him. There’s something off, something changed, and she doesn’t know what it is. She doesn’t know how to pinpoint it, or fix it.

 “You’ll be out soon, yeah. You’ll see Will--.. Maybe you’ll even buy one of those ‘ _Murder Husband_ ’ t-shirts, you know? Did you see that in Tattlecrime?”

She tries to lighten the mood, but it falls dreadfully flat very quickly. Abigail stammers, the corners of her smile threatening to fade away to nothing though she fights against it. Her hands grasp both of Hannibal’s a little tighter, her voice grows a little more hushed.

“I know I’ve left. I know I come to see you when you need me, but I didn’t. I missed you, but…” A deep breath. "Are you all right, here? Are they treating you okay?”

Abigail turns over one of his hands in her own, raises his wrists to peek at the skin just to make certain. She catches a glimpse of those old scars, of Will’s attack by proxy. “You’re not hurt or anything, right? Bet the food sucks in comparison to before, but…”

She wants to make it better, _so_ badly. 

“I’m well.” His instinct is to comfort her. But comfort does not belong in this place. And more of her touch will open more wounds. “I’m not really a t-shirt person. Still: I never would have said I was a jumpsuit person, either.” The jumpsuit is tailored, ironed, laundered apart from the rest of the inmates’. Another favour from Alana. Payment for a death and a birth. 

Abigail finally does drop his hands, kneeling and instead sitting back on her heels, comfortably on the floor before him.

“I mean...it’s not nearly as nice as a three-piece," she says, "but it could be worse. Your hair’s even a little shorter too, huh? The hair makes you look a little scarier. Not like bite-your-face-off level of scary, but like badass intimidating. Will’s gonna love it.” She offers a small smile, two thumbs up. Abigail’s talking a lot, but at least it’s keeping this from becoming painfully silent and moody.

“You’re right,” Hannibal adds. “The food sucks.”

“Ugh, I bet. Even I miss your amazing dinners, and I don’t even eat anymore.”

 She’s dropped his hands. Hannibal stands; turns away. 

“Will doesn’t love me,” he says to the glass wall, and his reflection in it. Abigail isn’t reflected, he notices with a distinct lack of surprise. “Or he doesn’t want to, or choose to, which for all practical purposes, for the present, is the same. The picture you painted at our last meeting-- the song we played together-- is a dying echo.”

There goes that unsettling clench in Abigail’s stomach yet again, and still after all she’s done to try and avoid it. Perhaps her ideas were a little too lofty, too optimistic. Doesn’t mean there’s no bright future, though...right? She has to admit even to herself that it sounds more than a little bleak by now, but...it’s as Hannibal said: he will see Will again, someday.

Abigail moves from her seat to instead perch up on the cot’s edge, stretching out her legs before her, heels bracing on the floor.

“I think he’s afraid to,” she says, suddenly very interested in the sight of her own fingernails. “...B-But that doesn’t meant that’s not what he wants, right? Just because this is how it is now, doesn’t mean that happy ever after ending won’t happen.”

“He said that the teacup was broken," says Hannibal. "That is would never gather together again. He said that he would not miss me. That he did not have my appetite.”

Hannibal looks up, to the single window, dark now, that lets in sunlight but no view of the outside world. Only heaven, no earth.

“I saw him at my trial. He was subpoenaed and couldn’t refuse to give evidence. He could refuse to give eye contact.”

That’s painful. Painful as all hell, and Abigail cannot possibly imagine having the one person she loves the most, treat her so cruelly and dismissively. She silently realizes that she’s angry at Will. Very angry. 

“And that hurt because you love him,” she finishes softly. “Whether he meant it or not...you can’t know for sure yet. I’m not saying to hold onto the hope that he’ll turn around overnight and profess his love because, let’s be honest here, Will is a mess sometimes. But I think you have to wait it out. That’s all you can do. Wait it out and hope that Will realizes hiding from you is hiding from himself.”

Hannibal’s voice is very quiet. And very precise. “I think you’ll agree, Abigail, that at present, I have very little choice else.”

“Yeah. You turned yourself in,” she counters, not aggressively but not too softly either. “Now you have to deal with this.”

He puts on a good front. He’s used to it: he no longer has to don his person suit, but he has to don an even more carefully constructed veil of imperviousness, of control. A manner as if this bare cell were a sumptuous apartment in Florence, as if his visitors were his guests, as if this table were a harpsichord, as if his being here is a gracious choice.

But every now and then the emptiness shows its maw. He looks forward and sees nothing but this. Himself caged. No longer feared. No longer interesting.

“I am dealing with it,” he says.

Apparently, as far as Abigail is concerned, that’s not the right answer.

“Uh, no. No, you’re not.” She stares at Hannibal’s back, glances at this reflection in the glass, watches him watch himself and the room and the sky. “Take a look in the proverbial mirror, Hannibal. You’re a psychiatrist. You should know better. This isn’t _good_ for you. We have to do something. _You_ have to do something.”

He’s still looking up at the dark sky. “What do you suggest?”

“Couldn’t you...I don’t know. Manipulate someone? Do something, to try and get Will’s attention? Coercion is a good thing. Too bad I can’t do it myself, but...something to all but force Will to talk to you. To come here.” 

“I have to wait until the situation presents itself. Until the time is right.” Hannibal glances at her. “If it does present itself. If and when.”

Abigail’s almost afraid to ask it, but the question has left her lips before she can blink: “And if it doesn’t…?” 

“Then something else will present itself. While my cell is being cleaned. When I am being transferred to a hospital for a serious illness. When a visitor is careless or an orderly is sloppy or when Alana allows herself to forget for a moment what I am. When Jack Crawford sends someone new to see me. When another one of my victims is discovered and there is a new trial.” His eyes on her are detached.

“Any one of a hundred things could happen to give me a moment of opportunity. And when that happens, I will kill them all. I will escape.” Hannibal’s words are certain. Inexorable. “And I will find Will Graham.”

His words are so sure, so full of confidence, and while such unrepressed focus might be foolish from others, when Hannibal says such things Abigail knows how to be anything but. He’s serious, dead serious, and he’s not playing games. Hannibal really would be able to find just a second of slack and turn everyone, everything, upside down. With bare hands, too.

From where Abigail sits and looks up at him standing there, looking at her, she can feel a shiver down her stiff, frigid spine. Never has he looked so positively _dangerous_. She suddenly remembers that there is lean muscle beneath appalling jumpsuit, and sheer raw force of will behind those eyes seemingly dulled by this cage...and it’s a comfort. For some odd reason, Abigail finds a shaky smile gracing her lips as he stares at her, in spite of the severity of his vicious words.

“That’s exactly what you’ll do,” her young voice states, smile growing marginally more sincere, though distant. “...Good to know the Hannibal I know isn’t lost under there after all.”

“I’m not lost.” But he does take more frequent enjoyment in doing what he’s just done to her: causing a shiver of fear. It is one of the few pleasures left to him, and one which he could only enjoy in rare moments in his old, free life. “But I’ll admit that when I do find Will, I’m not entirely certain of what I will do with him” He doesn’t hide the menace.

There’s another question Abigail doesn’t want to ask, but she can’t stop her lips. No matter how many degrees cooler the room suddenly feels. “...Could you kill him, too?”

“Have you seen Will since you and I spoke in Italy? Since we spoke of his forgiveness and a future together?”

How does she say that she saw him just a handful of timeless moments ago, in this very exact realm...in a very different situation? With a blonde, a boy, dogs, a cabin. Away from this, so far removed?

She doesn’t say it. Not openly, at least.

“I saw him in Italy again. You and him, at the Uffizi. ...And I saw him just before this, here in the U.S. again.”

 Hannibal’s gaze on her is sharp. “And I wonder why you have only just mentioned that, when we’ve been discussing him for the past half an hour. I take it he wasn’t wearing one of those ‘ _Murder Husbands_ ’ t-shirts you mentioned.”

“Well…” Abigail feels chastised, and rightfully so. She can’t blame Hannibal for that look set to kill. She grows visibly hesitant then, parting her lips for moments before she really says anything.

“...He still wears flannel, at least,” she says. There’s a long, long pause. Then, voice barely a whisper: “...And a wedding ring.”

A stab of pain. Hannibal has to close his eyes with the sharpness of it. Then they’re opened again, narrowed, the color of blood.

“Will has always had emptiness that he seeks to fill. It seems he has filled some of them.”

Hannibal should not hurt Abigail in return; it is cruel. Will’s choices are not Abigail’s fault. But being here has made him cruel. It is one of the small powers left to him. “And he has another child, now, does he? To replace you?” 

That’s a low blow. It’s one that hits her right in the stomach, low and hard, clenching her insides until nausea erupts.

“Wow…” She exhales, suddenly rising to her feet and planting hands on her hips as if ready to fight. She does look ready to fight, actually, lashes fluttering and expression anything but kind, instead a mixture of upset and anger. Frustration. “Yeah. A child to replace the one _you_ gave to him and then took from him, right in front of his eyes. I was never really his child, anyway. Nor was I yours. You made damn sure of that.”

Oh, she’s magnificent when she’s angry. What Hannibal could have made of her, given more time. What they could have been, together.

They have lost so much.

Pain and loss twist inside him, where he has his own emptiness which will never be filled. Vast empty room where he had once dared to envision an equal partner. A family. The pain brings bitter words to his lips.

“So this is how long your forgiveness lasts. You held out longer than Will, at least.”

The room has been in semi-darkness; with these words, he strides to the light and turns it on. Though he knows, better than most, that ghosts aren’t banished by light.

“Oh my god, you’re impossible. You’re actually so frustrating!” It takes every bone in her body not to yell. It would echo in this space...or would it? Abigail’s voice is always strangely dull these days. Instead of extolling her voice, she just gestures with her hands, pacing on her feet, now squinting at the added light to the cell.

“I’m trying to make things better. Will is over there dreaming of me every other night, waking up screaming with invisible blood on his hands because sometimes, to him, you’re not the one who killed me, _he_ is. A-A-And you’re here, doing what? Ungratefully picking a f-fight with me when I’m trying to talk to you because something’s _wrong_ with you--...”

Abigail is trying very hard not to cry. It’s difficult and tears are brimming as she jabs a finger at him from across the room and continues on, but she doesn’t let those tears spill over just yet.

“I get it! This is unfair and it sucks! So what!? At least you’re still alive!”

Just saying that one sentence hurts her more than it must’ve hurt Hannibal. It almost threatens to overflow tears.

“But I said I forgive you. And so did Will,” she continues on. “...If you want me to leave and not come back, just say it. But at least don’t be _rude_ . Remember that in spite of the threat to my life, I chose to _ask_ for your help, I chose to _lie_ and to manipulate the FBI in our favour, I chose to push Alana Bloom from a second-story window, and I chose to _stay_ with you. And that’s all during and after the fact that you killed my best friend in my _father’s_ cabin, oh my god--... So if you think that’s not me continuously forgiving you, then just...fuck, I’m tired.” 

Hannibal is also tired.

“You chose to do all that. And to be fair, I ensured you had very little choice else. Don’t worry, Abigail. I have plenty of time, in here, to reflect upon events and circumstances.”

“Oh, _very_ little choice. Or I could’ve told Jack the truth and taken us _both_ to prison. Maybe more of a choice, then.”

Abigail is a little less hostile than a few moments ago, but no less exasperated and keeping her distance across the length of the entire glass cage, purposefully placing herself far away and with a desk between them. Even though they can’t hurt one another, technically. Or, at least, he can’t hurt her. Not again, and not anymore.

“Then you sit here and reflect, because I’m tired of being trapped in this constant crossfire and feeling consistently like it’s my fault or that I can’t stop it.” She shoves hands into her pockets, slumps shoulders, takes a few steps of stride to lean against the walled bookshelves and absently read the spines of the few volumes resting there. Just as absently, she asks with a dullness to her voice, distance. “Do you think I should go, forever? Just...leave?”

“No.” The answer comes immediately. “No.”

He looks down, the overhead light casting his eye sockets and sheeks into dark shadows. He says, very quietly: “I need you.”

In theory, it should feel amazing, or at least fairly nice, to hear Hannibal say those three words. It doesn’t. Abigail doesn’t know why.

“I’m not a lure anymore,” she says with a sigh, eyes still mindlessly gazing over tiny golden letters on book spines. “And I don’t know how I’m helping or how you even need me. I don’t think you really do. I think you need the _thought_ of me.” 

“A ghost is a thought.” Hannibal’s voice barely carries; he does not look at her. “The thought of my sister reminded me for many years the existence of love.”

“...Then am I talking and acting just as you need me to be? Just as you think I would be?” She falls into a respectful silence when hearing of his sister. She continues to stand still, braced against the bookshelf.

“...That’s good. Least you have that,” she murmurs. “Wonder what I remind you of.”

“You remind me of her. And of him. You remind me of what is gone. Teacups shattered.” 

Abigail’s nod of acknowledgement is small, mind instead distracted by judging whether or not her constantly reminding him of these things is at all beneficial, or healthy. He probably thinks it is. But he’s biased.

He raises his head, his voice changing from hushed with pain to strong with resolution. “You understand that by telling me of his new family, you have in all probability sentenced them to death.”

Abigail doesn’t protest, only exhales a long (unnecessary) breath, and slowly turns her gaze up and back to Hannibal from across the cell. Will’s boy is young, by all means someone she could call brother. To think of him being killed is a sour taste. But she thinks of herself being killed, and suddenly there is clarity, and everything is just as it should be. It’s perfectly all right with her. 

“I understand that,” she whispers. “It’s not me Will would have to forgive for it.”

“I’m rather doubting Will’s capacity for forgiveness in general. And mine.”

“Then maybe you two will be equally horrible to one another and it’ll cancel out,” Abigail remarks dyly. “Oh wait. That happened.”

“Everything that can happen, does happen.” But Hannibal is thinking already of something else. Something he has read in one of the newspapers provided for him, (He could glean a more detailed account from Tattlecrime dot com, but he’s not permitted such salacious reading matter. Might arouse the devil.) A killer of families. A lovelorn, lonely murderer.

He speaks thoughtfully. “But for some things to happen, it might require a little assistance.”

Abigail’s seen Hannibal in private for more than long enough to know when the cogs are fluidly turning behind his inky eyes. She asks, without hesitation, words rattling in her own skull: “What are you planning?” 

“I am planning how to bring Will Graham to me. And how to ensure he will never forget me.”

Hannibal walks to his desk. He opens a drawer and pulls out heavy cream paper; an envelope. A short blunt pencil which is deemed too small to cause fatal damage.

“A pencil is lethal in very many ways,” he comments to Abigail, almost cheerfully, as he sits at the desk and begins to write.

_Dear Will._


	6. The Fall

If Abigail had seen the slaughter and near-kiss, she would've been absolutely excited, so thrilled that Hannibal and Will were able to finally reunite after so much and so long between them. It would've made her feel more sure of it all, unlike how wavering she'd felt beneath the surface when she visited Hannibal in that prison cell.

On some level of her non-existence, she is aware that Hannibal and Will have met again outside of those prison walls, the latter having hatched a plan and set it into motion, changed in the process. There is darkness shared in both of their eyes, right alongside the beautiful bright, and Abigail—if nobody else is outwardly approving—finds it to be so unspeakably gorgeous.

But whatever visions she might have had about prosperity and domesticity, quiet sharing of hunt and blood, lips and bodies and minds, fell from her mind in the blink of an eye.

What she feels is so jolting that it shakes her entire small, slender body, squeezing her stomach tight and forcing nausea to sway her. The emotion and physical sickness is so sudden to her, that it's almost as if she's been shoved and dropped, slammed into the concrete floor, so hard that her spirit separated from the dead flesh.

It feels like death, again.

And that is precisely what throws her violently into the realm of the living.

Her connection to these two men, Hannibal the most, is what has caused this. It's almost like she's connected by some invisible thread, and now that his life is very intensely in sudden danger, she can feel the effects of it, too. Like she is obligated to stop the slow creep of mortality, and keep the living alive, while maintaining the death in her own dead.

It's upon the shore that she materializes, like a gasping fish out of water carelessly tossed to the bottom of boat, to flutter and flail and eventually die away. Except beneath her body is sand, grainy and rough with grey rocks and chips of ivory shells. Abigail clings to that prickly feeling of it against her palms and back, and is on her feet in an instant.

The night on the shore is like a frigid curtain of black only barely afforded some dim moonlight from behind. The night ocean greedily swallows everything it touches, and nearly takes the two men as well.

In absolute horror, Abigail stands and looks at them both, finds distress screaming in all of her when she can see exactly how broken and discarded they look, like rag dolls. It takes her a second to react then, because neither of them seem to be moving, breathing, living…even though she inherently knows that they are.

First, to Will's side on her knees, she shakes his body violently, shrieking his name into the lonely night. Her screams are swallowed by the harsh winds now and again, her loose hair ghoul-like, matted with briny moisture and sand. Her eyes shine with overflowing tears like the bright morning ocean, safer and protective by the guide of the sun, but no less dangerous beneath the surface. Where there is no kindness or forgiveness, her minty eyes can offer exactly that.…

But why doesn't it work?

“Will! W-Will, wake up! Will! Hanni–! Will–”

She's distressed, panicked, confused, unsure what to do. There is a gap of about a metre between Will and Hannibal both lying there lifeless on the shoreline, still licked on their feet by the rocking tides. Back and forth between this gap, she hurriedly bustles for a moment, shaking and gasping and wishing all over again that she could've given her life for them both a second time. But she isn't worth two of them—she isn't. Perhaps her little life isn't even worth one of them, but she'll be damned if she still doesn't try her best.

It wasn't supposed to end this way. It's all wrong. They can't die. Not here. This is a beach of birth, not death. Not tonight.

 _Save the doctor who can save them both_.

Abigail makes a split-second decision and turns from Will with one final violent shake of his body, to instead focus on Hannibal.

“Hannibal! Hanni– Hannibal! You gotta wake up! Wake up, wakeup! O-Oh my god, wake up– get up, breathe– H- _Hannibal_ –!”

Her voice is like a crackly wail, begging but unable to be sustained for more than a few seconds at a time, devoid of any real breath or air at all. She may be shaken, scared beyond belief, but Abigail still does her best as there is no room for anything less.

Shaking his body doesn't help, so she leans down and presses her head flush to his chest. She can hear with her one remaining ear that heartbeat, the same one she heard for the first time in his kitchen when he held her so close and so tight in the wake of her confession, that he prevented her from falling apart. If at anytime she needed to return the favor, now would be it, for that heartbeat is no longer crisp and lively, but unsteadily thready and dull, dying.

Abigail can't let it die.

With a gasping, shuddering breath, she leans up on knees beside Hannibal's torso and shoves both hands to his chest. She is small but strong, and it doesn't take much effort to lock her elbows, curl her fingers and palms together, and press hard.

She gets in five compressions before she's shaking again, doubting herself and the effectiveness of any of this. What to do, what to _do_?

Fumbling blindly for a moment, Abigail gasps and cries at his name again, “Hannibal” becoming both a prayer and a chant as if it'll reach inside of him and touch his soul, pull him alive from whatever hellish depth close to death he's drowning in.

Kneeling low and pulling at his jaw, one severely trembling hand pinching his nose tight, Abigail takes the last few breaths that he once took from her in Baltimore on that fateful night, and returns it to him. It was borrowed life and air, anyway. Pressing her lips to his, she breathes hard into Hannibal's mouth, forcing air down his throat, into his lungs, against saltwater no doubt stagnant there.

This process, with the addition of shaking him hard and slapping at his pallid, cold cheeks, is what she repeats again. Before long, as if she is material and made of this living world, Abigail has stripped of her jacket-vest sweater, and draped it over Will nearby. She's stripped off her jacket itself below that, and draped it over Hannibal. The garments from her small, cold body are so small in comparison to the men that they barely even cover all of their torsos. It's an effort that seems pointless and leaves her wickedly cold, but still she tries everything. Only a mere few minutes pass, but it feels like an eternity when neither of the men awaken.

She's just about to heave air into Hannibal's chest again when she sobs loudly and _prays_  that some bit of his name reaches his ears.

“ _Please_ , Hannibal– you gotta get up—you and Will… C-C'mon– breathe, wake up! Wake up–, _Hannibal_ , come on–…"

***

Darkness. Black as blood in the moonlight.

He doesn’t feel pain, or cold, or wet. He feels nothing but Will’s hands on him. Will's arms around him.The kiss of his breath, flavoured with blood; the light of his blue eyes that finally, finally understand.

It’s beautiful.

When Will pushed them over the cliff, Hannibal felt nothing but happiness. To live well is to die well, and to die in Will’s arms in a perfect moment of beauty and understanding is the apotheosis of everything he could have imagined.

To die well—but first to fly, falling through the air, Will’s body pressed against his, his face so close that they breathed the same air, hearts together, blood mingling, both singing with the triumph of the kill and the glory of love.

They hit the water still holding fast to each other.

 _Achilles wished all Greeks would die, so that he and Patroclus could conquer Troy alone._ Alone, only two of them in the world, holding fast in that water. They sank and sank and Hannibal held tight to Will, breath burning in his chest, feeling Will’s arms, his legs, his face buried against his neck.

And then it was black.

And now they are floating free, together. No more pain. No more cold.

But they’re not alone any more.

He sees Mischa first. Blonde and pale, her hair in curls, her cheeks round and smooth.

Behind her stand his parents: Mama beautiful, Tėvas severe but strong. They are less clear: rippling, as if made of water.

There are more, behind them. A smooth glimpse of kimono silk, the elegant shoulder of a dinner jacket. A man stands off to the side, alone: work-worn hands, bright blue eyes, a fishing jacket. In his arms, Hannibal feels Will smile.

Will has always so wanted family.

“Hannibal!”

Of course Abigail must be here, too. He turns to her, smiling. Still holding Will, he reaches for her but she runs towards him and punches him hard in the chest.

Abigail doesn't know what Hannibal dreams– how _could_ she? All she knows is that seconds are ticking by, precious seconds in a realm she herself is no longer part of.

To her, time means nothing at all. But to these two men washed ashore in the moonlight, beaten and bloody and cold as ice, time is everything.

Abigail may be but a shadow, a right ghost able to be felt and heard and experienced to Hannibal, but even she must bend to the limits of worldly time. And she knows, knows so well, that time is of the essence.

Again, she slams hands to his chest, hard, _harder_ still. Once more time she leans down and pinches his nose, blows hard into his mouth until her own cheeks sting with effort. Only another small moment has passed, but in her blind panic it feels like half a century. She is truly all but punching him in the chest, willing him awake with urgent cries and wails all the more.

“Hannibal! Wake up! Open your eyes! _Wake up!_ I need you– _Will_  needs you! Please,  _please_ , Hannibal…”

She's talking but to Hannibal her words are muffled, as if underwater. Her fists batter his chest but the sensation is distant.

He looks beyond her to Mischa, who raises a baby hand to beckon him. How Will will love her. So many years have passed, and she looks just the same. How does she see him? he wonders. As a grown man, battered and bloody, his hands guilty of death? Or does she see him as the brother she knew, innocent and protective, quick and loving?

He opens his mouth to speak to her, to speak to Will, and he feels cold lips on his own.

Will.

A kiss before dying. Farewell and greeting.

Oh, Will.

He almost wishes he could have lived, to feel this, Will's kiss at last, and be alive, too.

And then the pain.

The kiss forces pain down his throat, into his lungs. Burning knives of cold. Air warmed by nothing. And again. A tearing, a piercing, ripping his lungs apart. And with it, other pain: his gut, his shoulder, his ankle. His heart. Oh his heart hurts. And Will...

Will is gone.

The air Abigail has forced into his lungs comes out, with a deep groan of pain. His eyelids flutter.

If Abigail wasn't already crying and chanting at Hannibal, breathless and dead as she is, she might've _screamed_ with relief at seeing him awaken. As it is, she just allows a more fierce wave of tears to come down her face, her hands moving from Hannibal's chest to his head instead. She cups his face there, and the skin is so cold, but he's alive. He's moving, those lashes fluttering, a pained sound from his lips.

She bends down closer, an ache in her shoulders from the effort so far. “Yes–…oh my god, yes, open your eyes. It's me, it's Abigail– Hannibal. _Please_ … I know it hurts, b-but you've gotta get up.”

A cough, a rasped shallow breath. Cold lips forming one word.

"Will."

His hand trembles, as if to reach out.

“ _Yes_ – yes, Will. Will is here. He needs you, Hannibal. Please wake up, Will needs you. You have to help him!” Her small hands gingerly pat at Hannibal's cold face, still fervently trying to usher him back to full consciousness.

Mischa. She's still there, in the darkness. So is Will. But they're both fading, shimmering like moonlight on water, and Hannibal knows he has to make a choice. Step forward, or step back. Choose peace, or pain.

_"Will needs you. You have to help him!"_

The voice is of the dead. But it brings him back to life.

Hannibal coughs. He rolls onto his side, and vomits sea water onto the sand. He heaves in a rasping, shuddering breath.

Abigail has never felt so relieved to see someone choke, vomit, and breathe so shakily. But she is beyond relieved. Not to the point of thinking everything will be okay, but to the point that she can stop crying long enough to focus on helping. She holds Hannibal to his side in the grainy sand, arms snaking around to rub his back and offer support. Abigail is trembling, but not only because the night is particularly frigid.

“Hannibal–… Hannibal, can you hear me? It's me– it's Abigail. A-Are you okay?”

What a dumb question. So idiotic, childish. She berates herself immediately for it. Of course he isn't _okay_. Far from it. Still, she holds hope, rubbing his back, holding his face, trembling.

“Thank god you're awake. B-But there's no time. There's no– you have to help Will too, I don't know what to do and– a-and…”

"Everyone on this beach is dead."

His voice is rough, almost a growl, raw with sea water and grief.

"You're dead too."

He forces himself to his knees and crawls through rocks and sand to a dark shape lying still. Behind his eyelids, he sees Mischa. A slender ray of light.

Abigail watches and blinks in surprise, eyes stinging with the thick, salty sea air, and her own tears still dribbling. She moves back on her knees, giving Hannibal space enough to move, while still hovering close enough to help should he fall.

His words sound like a defeat, and she shakes her head immediately, gulping down a ball of emotion in her throat. That's when she leans down over Will, brushes wet curls from his dangerously pale face, and sniffles, tapping his cheek and trying to awaken him again.

“I'm dead so you and Will don't have to be. You owe it to me to _live_. P-Please save Will, too…”

Every movement an agony. He drags himself to Will, who lies motionless. In that moment, with his sister's face still in his sight, with a different dead girl begging him to live, he makes another choice.

If Will dies, he will too.

Will's face is still oozing black blood. A good sign. With a muffled grunt of pain Hannibal raises himself up on his knees. He tilts Will's head back. Bends to him like a lover and kisses breath into his mouth. Then presses on his heart, his beloved precious heart, hard enough to start a rhythm. Hard enough to hear a rib crack, to start the blood flowing again from his wounds. Then a kiss, a breath. More compressions.

_Take this life. Take it. Make it yours. Live with me._

The words are loud in his ears. He doesn't know if he's speaking them aloud, or not.

Will looks dead, and Abigail feels panic begin to well in her stagnant veins yet again, refreshed. She still trembles like a leaf, shaken by the situation, unsure of how to further help, but also just content to watch in silence. Falling back from her knees, she feels detached, distinctly removed from the moment, as lips meet and ribs crack, blood and breath are forced to flow in Will's lifeless body. Wide, teary-eyed shock allows her to watch, unable to look away for even a second. Below her breath, she whispers again and again, like a prayer.

“Please wake up, please Will, wake up, come on…”

Will does stir after long moments, but only minutely, a mere twitch of muscles beaten by the impact of the fall. It's not a relief, not this time. Abigail suddenly can't watch, and curls into herself, pressing the heels of both palms hard into her closed eyes. This isn't real, this can't be happening. … _She_  isn't real.

Time has no meaning. It's measured in compressions and breaths, waves striking the shore. The tide is coming in and the surf licks at them, their feet and legs, Will's hands as they lie limp on the sand.

At last, at last, Will takes in a faint and shaky breath and Hannibal feels his pulse beating.

Hannibal, so careful with his speech, so measured with his actions, utters an incoherent cry, an animal sound of relief and pain and he gathers Will's body up into his arms, sobs tearing through him as the water creeps up around them and he presses his forehead against Will's and feels his breath so close on his cheek.

Hannibal's crackly sob from a salt-worn throat leaves a harsh, grating feeling down the entire length of Abigail's spine. It makes her shiver and feel weak, and yet fills her with relief.

Will is alive, and so is Hannibal. They'll be… They must survive.

“Promise me,” she shakily breathes, voice barely audible above the rumbling roar of the tides. “Promise me you'll save him,” she says, not really sure if she's talking to the unconscious Will, or the barely cognizant Hannibal, or both men at once.

It's a feeble attempt to show some sort of compassion where she could barely have an impact. She couldn't even save Will, nor wake Hannibal for so long… She's dead, and it sinks in harder than ever just then.

On hands and knees, Abigail turns to the sea and chokes out a quiet cry in the spray of brine that hits her face, soaks her skin. Palms gritted with rocky sand, she moves towards the water, fully intent on letting it whisk her away forever. What else can she possibly do now? Either they both live, or both die…or worse, one lives and one doesn't. But at least she's made her last full effort before she must fade.

In that instant, Will opens his eyes, and nothing and no one else exists for Hannibal.The world could burn, the world could plummet and fall.

Will is alive and in his arms and that is everything.

The future is insignificant, and so is the past. Mischa fades away and Abigail, for him, has gone. The dead are done. Will is alive.

Hannibal bows his head, holds Will close, and weeps.


	7. The Ending

Three years pass.

Three years of danger and calm, bloodlust and sanity. Three years of running. Three years of wonder.

Three years of tentative, growing love.

It's hard to believe it's the same amount of time that he was imprisoned. That time was thin and cold and sterile. This...this time is rich, and deep. Textured and flavoured, full of colours that Hannibal could never have imagined. More precious than all the long years before that, when he was alone.

Sometimes he thinks his life has been a fresco: painted layer by layer upon rough plaster, until now, with Will, he has reached his final form, full-bodied and true. Everything beforehand was an outline. All ghosts.

Sometimes he thinks of those moments on the beach, when he and Will were both dead. He made a choice, then, always to be together. They could live together, or die together, and he made the correct choice, to live. They both did.

But there were those dark moments, before Will breathed again. Before Hannibal breathed again. When he saw their dead, and was tempted to join them as a pale serried ghost in their ranks. Mischa. His mother, his father. Will's father.

Abigail.

But Abigail had urged them to live. Begged for them to leave her. Her slender limbs soaked, her hair hanging lank around her pale face, her blue eyes the colour of hope.

Why?

Tonight, Hannibal lies in the bed he and Will share, and despite the warmth of Will's body and the sweet sound of his-sleeping breath, the sound of trust and love, he is thinking about those moments of darkness. He is thinking about the choice Will made for both of them, to die; and the choice Hannibal made for both of them, to live.

He gently disentangles himself from Will's slumbering embrace. Slips out of bed and pulls on pyjama bottoms and a sweater. He walks through the dark and quiet house, only the latest of a string of places he and Will have called home for a time. Down the stairs, to the living room.

He is not surprised at all to see a slender figure curled upon the sofa.

Three years is a very long time…at least to Abigail it is. If she were alive, she can imagine growing much more mature, maybe even less—fresh-faced, more like an older young woman rather than a younger young woman. But for her, time stretches on in infinite directions, for as far as her icy eyes can possibly see. Perhaps that is why she leaves the living to live, allows them all the time they can have now. Three years since she urged them to survive her, Abigail can sometimes still taste the ocean's brine from that fateful night on the beach, the texture coarse on her tongue and throat.

Tonight, however, all she can experience is quietude. A quiet comforting setting, in a home not at all her own. Not at all permanent. Not entirely that of Will or Hannibal, but a perfect mixture of them together as one. Across the top of her head is a thick band, headphones sitting on her dark-haired skull. Body reclined on the couch as though she totally belongs there in such a comfortable position amongst the living, Abigail plays a mean air guitar along with the music filling her ears.Her eyes are closed shut, ankles crossed and propped against the couch's armrest, and her hands move with the rhythm, one foot tapping the other to the beat. It's a roaring classic rock song, something from the 80's just about, but it's clear she's enjoying it, there in the dark and silent loneliness of the Lecter-Graham living room. Abigail merely hums very softly and continues on like a typical young girl she is– she _was_ –, in her own little world, immune to being disturbed even by the living Hannibal who enters the same space.

It's like she's settled into the house too, living there comfortably while listening to music from Hannibal's cell phone, wearing a set of quality pyjama solid top and plaid bottom that was gifted to her by Hannibal so many years ago in Baltimore.

Almost like she lives here.

He smiles to see her: sprawled on the sofa, playing air guitar. He walked in on her doing this one time, in Maryland, in his secret coastal house where he kept her safe and unseen. That time, she was embarrassed: as if he'd found her doingsomething forbidden or private or foolish. But she was just being a girl. Just being young. And it had made him glad that someone who had been through so much unhappiness and fear, who lived in a gilded glass cage, could still have moments of innocent fun.

He leans over and lifts one side of the headphones off her ear, bending to listen.

"What's the song, Ms Rock Star?"

At the feeling of half headphones lifted from her skin, Abigail merely stops her roaring guitar solo and blinks open her bright blue eyes. She isn't even startled, like she had completely expected Hannibal to join her at some point or another. Looking up at him as he leans in, her wide smile nearly smushes her cold cheek right up against his own, as they share the music in their closeness.

“I know you're not American and don't really listen to music with lyrics, but _please_ tell me you know the band Blue Öyster Cult.”

"I listen to music with lyrics. What do you think opera is?"

She scoffs, huffing out teasingly. “That doesn't even count.”

He listens more carefully. "'Don't Fear The Reaper'?"

Of course her lips are twitching with a widening smile. “Mmhm! This is one of _the_ most beautiful and iconic songs, like…ever. If you haven't heard it before, you're missing out.”

With that, she pulls the headphones off. The rock guitar riffs spill out until she braces on an elbow, slides the headphones on his head.

It's operatic. Drama and texture and more drama, bombastic lyrics and yet there's a theatrical appeal. He listens all the way through, tapping his pyjama-clad thigh with one finger to the beat. He glances at Abigail. "It's a song about love and death. The most profound experiences of a lifetime."

By the time the song is finished and Hannibal comments, Abigail has shifted her position to sit up on the couch, knees tucked comfortably up against her chest. She smiles wryly and gives a nod, eyes seemingly shimmering even though the living room is dark around them.

"Mmhm. Which is why I'm surprised especially _you_ haven't heard it before." Licking her lips, draping her arms out over her knees in a stretch, she blinks at Hannibal with a hum, clearly in very good spirits. "I bet Will loves that song, too. Probably knows all the words, since it came out maybe when he was ateenager or something like that. You like it?"

He nods. Though he's answering another question. "Will doesn't fear death. Not his own. He fears others'. I wonder...-...I wonder if he knew that truth about his own fear, when he heard this song on the radio."

“Tomato, tomahto. Reaper, Ripper. He's with you now, isn't he? Clearly he doesn't fear his own death. But his own real fear—is maybe what he's trying to get over, with you. Part of a justification for that, well…ya'know, other people die.”

"Like you." He regards her, a ball of energy on his sofa. "It's good to see you, Abigail."

“…Like me,” she answers, seemingly unperturbed by her own undead-ness as she continues to smile her small smile. “But not like you, or Will. It's good to see you, too. Glad you're…not-dead. I was so scared you were, last time.”

She wriggles over a bit to make space on the couch beside her, an unspoken gesture for him to join her there.

"We almost were. Possibly closer than you knew." He sits beside her. "It has taken a long time to recover."

“All I know is that you were so _cold_. I don't think I've ever been so scared in my life.” A pause. “…Well. _Non-life_.” She tilts her head to look at him, quietly. “At least you're recovering with Will. I could've sworn he wasn't breathing.”

"He wasn't breathing. He didn't want to live, Abigail." He looks down, remembering. "It's taken a long time to convince him that he wants to be alive. It's a more difficult choice, for him, than dying."

“He pulled you two off that cliff, didn't he? I felt it. I was thrown onto the shore like you were.” Elbow propped on knees drawn up to her chest, Abigail raises a hand to brush through her dark hair, quieting. “Ugh. Will's so stubborn. …How he listens to you means something, that you could convince him at all.”

"He tried to kill us both. And in that moment, I was fine with that. Until you punched me in the chest." He smiles at her."I don't know that I did convince him to live. I believe he convinced himself, in time."

“I _had_ to,” she says, but not without a momentary cringe across her young face. “Besides,” she huffs. “I didn't die so he could pull you both off a cliff. I kinda wanna punch him. …And hug him so hard.”

"You can. He's upstairs. If you're careful...he would think it was only a dream."

He hesitates to suggest it. Even now, Will has nightmares about Abigail. Probably more than Hannibal knows. He only mentions them haltingly, only when he's aware that Hannibal is aware, because despite forgiveness, despite the love between them, Will will always blame Hannibal for her death. Almost as much as Will blames himself.

A kind dream of Abigail could be therapeutic, perhaps. But it would also be, to some extent, manipulative. And Hannibal is trying, trying very hard, to give Will full agency. To be honest and not pull his strings.

But if Abigail wants to...

"He's asleep," he adds, perhaps unnecessarily. "He sleeps better, these days, than he used to."

Abigail looks faintly surprised that Hannibal has agreed so easily, suggested that she could go up and see, wake, Will. The permission to do so is so tempting, _so_ tempting, that it truly does border on manipulative that he agreed at all. Maybe that's why Abigail steels herself, gives a small nod, and finds her petite body sliding off the couch to her feet.

“I think I want to. Even if it's waking him up, if it's just for a little while. I'll be careful with what I say. Show me where he is? Come with me…?”

She asks those last two questions a little meekly, resolve shimmering in her eyes.

He nods. It's Abigail's choice, after all.

He stands and walks with her across the house, up the stairs to their room. He opens the door for her, but doesn't go in. From the doorway they can both see Will asleep: curled on his side, body drawn into himself, except for the hand that stretches out to lie on the pillow beside him, Hannibal's pillow, as if he has reached out in his sleep to touch Hannibal's face.

For the first two and more years they were together, on the run,Will never slept naked: he would rise in the night and put on clothes, and Hannibal never commented, though he knew why.

Now, he does, sometimes; he trusts Hannibal and his own mind that much.

But tonight he's wearing a t-shirt and boxers, blankets bunched around his waist. There's a dog sleeping on the bottom of the bed, near his feet. It raises its head andlooks straight at Abigail. Just looks: no tail wag, no growl.

Standing there in the doorway has Abigail feeling all sorts of nervous and unsure if she should really step inside and do this. But not a handful of seconds later, she's inexplicably drawn past the door frame and towards the man who looks so warm and comfortable in sleep, a stark contrast to the last frigid, quiet, nearly-dead image ingrained in Abigail's mind from that night on the rocky shore. The dog curled loyally at Will's feet stirs, and for a second Abigail wants to reach out and pet it, but she is afraid to do so. She looks past the adorable creature and instead moves to the side of the shared bed. Her footsteps make no noise at all, not more than a slight fluttering of breeze.

With the dim moonlight trickling through shades also casting Hannibal into shadow in the doorway, the entire feel is quite horror-film esque. She is the ghost.

Standing by Will's side of the bed, she's facing his back half-turned away in his unconscious reach to Hannibal's empty side. She looks up and hesitates, casting the doctor a look past biting her lip, before she just…goes for it.

Slowly, so gently to the point where her fingers tremble, Abigail brings a hand to Will's head. Softly but firm enough torouse him even slightly from slumber, she presses palm to his warm skin, lovingly brushes back a mess of brown curls, and fights the way her theist constricts with repressed emotion when her fingers drift through his hair, saddened eyes watch his relaxed face.

“Will…” she whispers, turning her hand to up his scraggly cheek. It's almost reverent. Holding her breath (though it makes no difference either way when she's already dead), she watches as Will stirs.

Will Graham is dreaming of…nothing. Nothing at all but blue skies and the darkness below the ocean, the way a crescent moon reflects beautifully on each wave.

Where previous dreams of this ambiguous nature may have morphed into harsh night terrors, this night is exceptionally comfortable for him. He's so deep in his quiet sleep that he doesn't even notice when Hannibal leaves the bed. He's sprawled onto his side, shirt and boxer shorts twisting under the blankets with the movement to reaching for the absent doctor. Will's hand meets the coolness of empty pillow, Hannibal's body warmth long faded from the soft fabrics, and even then he remains in a restful sleep.

…That is, until the dead come calling.

Suddenly then, Will is dreaming of _everything_. No longer is this room and home a sanctuary, but a grave.The lake down the road is suddenly the Atlantic, water hard as rock and frigid as ice, upset at being forced to swallow Hannibal, Will, and all heir bloody beautiful sins from that cliff.

The pictures on the walls suddenly all have faces, with striking blue eyes and dark hair, creamy skin that is freckled with a smiling youth.

He's watching Hannibal make him a morning coffee, and instead of pouring mild into the pungent brew, the liquid has turned deep red. It is the blood collected from where it burst forth out of Abigail's neck. "Eating her is honoring her," Hannibal says distantly, hazily. "Otherwise it's just murder." Mourning coffee.

Suddenly Will is stricken with fever, hot and heated as Hannibal goes down on him, spreads his thighs until his hips ache with the effort, body bruised and sore with the feral lust.

The hand on his head is what cools him entirely, sends a sudden shiver down the entire length of his curved spine, and pulls him from the dream. It was not a nightmare…but this might be. A hallucination, in which he's sure that he is still floating away in space and dreaming.

Because there is Abigail's face above him, in his blearily-blinking eyes, still as beautiful and bright as he remembers it to be.

Her hand on his skin is like a clammy thing,having slithered up from the depths of the ocean, seeking comfort and warmth in the sun. His breathing picks up pace, his entire body shifts against the sheets, and like a man shellshocked and worn to the bone, Will stares up at Abigail as if she is the most important thing in the entire world.

This dream, this hallucination, is strikingly clear and real. He doesn't question it, he doesn't fight it. Not when the moment is so ripe and beautiful to experience, not when he finally has a chance to speak to her again.

Just one more time.

“Abigail…” He breathes quietly into the tense bedroom air, voice husky with sleep.

Standing in the doorway, Hannibal swallows. He feels his heart swelling. Will Graham's emotion is so extraordinary, so beautiful. His love the most precious power on earth. His happiness the rarest of gifts.

Hannibal feels the grace of this moment, but he also feels all the moments that should have been, but weren't. The years they should have had together, the three of them. The place he had made for them where they never got to live.

He watches Abigail's tenderness and Will's astonished joy, and the tears well in his eyes.

The very second Will says her name, it feels to Abigail that she's in a strange dimension, detached from any reality. It's been _so_ long since she'd last seen him, and since he could see her, that it feels…odd. Nice. She hardly even remembers or pays attention to Hannibal in that moment– she'd visited him quite a bit in the past years already, but here…this is now for Will, and Will alone.

What strikes Abigail above all is the sudden and intense emotion she feels for this man who groggily speaks her name, blearily blinks a smile up at her in the darkness.

“Hey, Will,” Abigail replies in a whisper, leaning closer. Past batting her lashes against an onslaught of pesky tears behind her blue eyes, Abigail is smiling. Her hand drops from his skin to brace on the bed, fingers trembling like leaves. “It's been a while, huh? I missed you.”

The first thought that comes to Will's mind is that she is beautiful. So beautiful and young when she smiles like that with eyes twinkling softly like stars. Will knows so much that this is a dream, a distraction from the reality of missing her so, so much these days, but it feels so _real_. So real that when he reaches up and tenderly cups her cheek in his warm hand, he can feel every inkling of cold against his nerves. All the while, he looks perfectly awestruck and yet…happy, a sleepy smile on his scraggly-haired, scarred cheeks.

"You're so cold–… God, I'm so sorry,” he breathes without much thought, the words surprisingly easy to bring to light between them. He doesn't even question where Hannibal is at this point– he isn't sure that seeing Hannibal and Abigail at the same time would bode well for Will himself. Now, his focus is on her,this beautifully tangible hallucination of his dead daughter, who he draws close suddenly. Sitting up in bed with sheets pooling at his waist, Will gently urges Abigail closer to him, into a warming embrace so Abigail can sit with him at the side of bed.

“You're so cold…come here.” His words are exceptionally soft. His tired and worn blue gaze is even softer, now filled with tears he sucks back in a deep breath, strong arms wrapping tightly around Abigail's petite form. How he wishes he could hold her forever like this.

“I missed you, too. Since Italy, I haven't…”

Had such a nice dream, a nice hallucination. All of his dreams of her since then have been of blood and breath, both whistling out through a gaping gash across her throat, right there on the kitchen floor in Baltimore. A grisly past he didn't want to relive.

But this…this is bliss.

Will doesn't realize that his hands are shaking as he tenderly brushes back her hair, blinks back tears.“You left me in the chapel,” he says softly, not an accusation, but a level voicing of his dreams. "You were–… There was so much blood.”

He's borderline rambling now, lost in himself, Abigail. Memories.

“I couldn't stop it,” he shakily breathes, face pressing into her hair. “I couldn't save you after all.”

Hannibal watches them embrace. This time is Will's and Abigail's: a moment together away from tragedy and loss. A moment for them to grieve and heal together. To share love openly and frankly in a way they never did when Abigail was alive, because Will feared to offer it and Abigail was too afraid to ask for it. It's for the two of them. A time for them to talk and touch and find peace.

It's for two, not for three.

And he watches and he feels love for both of them: the dead girl and the living man. And Hannibal Lecter, who for his whole life has watched and observed, analysed and manipulated, orchestrated and deceived, who has set himself up as judge and jury, creator and destroyer... Hannibal wants nothing more than simply to join them in their embrace.

But he holds back. It isn't his time.

“You saved me. You did good,” she says softly, shaken by the onslaught of repressed emotions. As she looks upin the embrace and sees the shine of hot tears trickle down from Will's eyes, she too allows her own to fall. Her tears are cold and lonely tears, but they feel warm when she childishly, in need of a warm embrace from Will, buries her face into his neck.

Here, her voice is muffled as she clings to him, her thin hands clutchingat his shirt. Her chest hurts terribly, and there's a guilt almost trickling in, too. Guilt at being here. “I stayed with Hannibal to protect me. …But I died to save both of you. I chose that, I promise. It was _me_.

 _You saved me_. If his heart were glass, the sound of it shattering to bits in that room would be deafening.He certainly feels struck in the chest, her coolness in his firm embrace like an icicle in his flesh.“You had no _choice_.”

He whispers angrily, hot tears sizzling down his face, dissolving into Abigail's hair and his own scruff. Will's eyes may close tightly, his hold may grow stronger around Abigail, but nothing can stop his sudden regret, anger, fear…his crying. This feels like trying to salvage a teacup—shattered to the tile for the third time. There is nothing left but dust and shadows, a memory of what was.

“You were scared of me, weren't you? A-At the cabin… You were so scared I would hurt you, that you ran away.I stopped looking for you, then– I'm _so_ sorry. I thought it was me who…I killed you.” Then, after a belatedly shaky breath, another whisper into her hair:

“…That's not _good_ , Abigail.”

“I had a choice, Will. I always did,” she breathes shakily, both of them stuck in this tearful embrace and neither of them seemingly willing to move from the comfort of it. They've never talked liked this, and to herit feels long overdue, like a weight finally lifting from its snag on her heart, deep in her still chest. “Just like I made a…c-choice that same day in my kitchen back home, to die. I knew that you would be to blame.”

“If you think you had a choice, that's because that's what he _wanted_ you to think,” Will hisses softly.The words aren't vehement or angry, but they're not unemotional either. They're pointed enough. His damn tears won't stop, and he wishes they would. He's so _tired_ , suddenly. “What did he tell you?”

This will escalate, Abigail can feel it. All the pent up anger and blame, guilt… It'll come out now or never.

“I'm not stupid–… God, Will, I'm not so naïve,” she sniffles, drawing back just enough to look into his face. “It doesn't matter what Hannibal said. You can't keep blaming him– or _yourself_.”

Will's hurt is written suddenly across his face as plain as day, eyes tired and wet. His voice grows more husky and low with each passing second, his arms falling away, down only to Abigail's waist loosely. From this position, he can look right at her.

“He killed you, Abigail.”

Well… _that_ feels to Abigail like a slap in the face. It makes her shoot back suddenly, snippily: “He saved my life.”

Now it's Will's turn to retort with a furrow of brows and voice incredulous. “Why are you _defending_ him? That's not–”

“Not _what_? Not fair? Jesus, Will– do you _hear_  yourself right now?”

His voice raises marginally, but that's only because he's matching Abigail blow for blow. “I'm trying to be realistic here, Abigail. Make sense of all this.”

“Then hold me responsible,” she challenges, palms coming up to hastily wipe tears from her cheeks. “Hold me responsible for helping my father lure those girls. Hold me responsible for killing Nicholas Boyle,hiding his body with Hannibal, and then _lying_ to the FBI about all it. Hold me responsible for consciously making the decision to fake my death, _knowing_ it would put you in jail, and save Hannibal and me from it. Hold me responsible– give me credit– for taking Hannibal's hand and dying in that kitchen because I love you.”

By the end, she's crying faster than her hands can wipe away, voice ragged and angry.

Will sits in silence. He sits and stares, head swaying with the emotions of it all. That's the thing about empathy: it's overwhelming. In moments like these, especially. Faced with truths and pains and everything in between, it's hard to bear the burden of it all. Especially when, for so very long, Abigail was the one normal thing in his life, untainted by blood and pure as her youthful smile. Knowing she'd killed Boyle had very nearly broken him. It stung like betrayal. Even worse was to emerge in Hannibal's kitchen and see her standing there and saying ‘sorry,’ as if that would fix all that she'd done. That too felt sickly.

But it's been many, many years since then. And maybe that was Will's fault all along. Where he saw good and evil and passed judgement, Abigail was the ambiguous grey that he wanted so sorely to understand. He'd spent so much time fighting Hannibal and Abigail, lamenting over the sins and differences, rather than understanding and coming to terms with the innateness of who they are, what's they've done.

He's here with Hannibal now, settled and not just surviving, but _living_. Wouldn't he also owe it to Abigail to accept and cherish, not condemn? He's given up good and evil…for behaviorism.

_Killing somebody…it feels that bad?_

_…No._

“I'm sorry,” his whisper is barely, barely audible, nasal with a deluge of more salty teardrops.“I-I just…I felt…”

He suddenly feels stupid, childish, sad. So sad. His hands curl into the fabric at Abigail's waist, as if a silent plea to draw her back into a hug. For someone who usually doesn't like excessive physical contact, he sure craves it from Hannibal, and now Abigail as well. He hardly even remembers that this is a hallucinatory dream, because her touch is so _real_.

With a quiet and broken voice, he admits to her what he never even had the heart to tell Hannibal himself: “I felt…jealous. Alone and…and _sorry_. Because I…I couldn't be enough of a father for you. That you had to make dangerous decisions without my help or support. I… You always liked Hannibal more than me. You spent so much time with him, and I'm…admittedly jealous. I couldn't even spend one day with you. Or take you fishing like I wanted. Or just…o-or just do something with you. _Anything_. It's not fair.”

“That _isn't_ fair…is it?” she says, suddenly softening to the point of tears again. Her voice is about to crack and quake, and before it can do so, she feels the tug of Will's hands on her shirt. Abigail leans in again quietly, bends and tucks her face against his neck, and allows her voice to break as tears come through.

She feels terrible. Because of all of it, she feels miserable because Will does. Or did, more accurately.

At first, she was impartial to Will. Then tolerated, then grew to truly appreciate. All the more when she was supposedly dead and he was all the way in jail, alone also. Kindred, broken spirits, connected by Hannibal.The revelation makes her feel like a doll, a thing to be shared between Hannibal and Will, but…it also makesher realize that isn't at all Will's intention. No– he just wants to have been given a chance to love her and care for her like Hannibal did. He wasn't given that opportunity, and Abigail supposes she can also feel a twinge of regret and blame towards Hannibal for that.

Even so…she has to set things right. If this is the last time she'll see Will or Hannibal in this life, then…

“You were just as much a father to me as Hannibal was,” she says, every word muffled into his skin, twisted and crackled by tears and sincerity. “I confided in Hannibal in a way I couldn't with you. That doesn't mean I like him more. I can't choose between both of you, I c-can't… I think you know that, deep down.”

She sniffles, chest and stomach paining as she clings to him tightly, curling fingers into Will's shirt. “Y-You…you were in a tough spot, and I helped put you there. I'm so sorry for all of it. And I'm sure Hannibal is really sorry, too.”

As if with a spark, she suddenly seems to remember his presence. And with watery eyes spilling over, she turns her head just enough to wordlessly look at the man in the doorway and wordlessly beckon him close with only her eyes, a tired and scared, sad, paining look. She can feel Will tremble as he holds her close, and she herself is shaky, but her words and tearful gaze on Hannibal doesn't falter, no matter how much it pains her to say it.

“Next time, Will. …N-Next time, we'll go fishing. Together.”

Hannibal has been silently observing. Silent tears running down his face. Their interaction is beautiful, and painful, and it has been very difficult for him to hold back. But Abigail looks at him, and he knows....he knows what she is saying without words. What is true even as she makes promises to Will about next time.

She has done what she needs to do, visiting the land of the living over and over again. She has found and offered forgiveness. She has given and received love. She has saved their lives. She has helped to heal this open wound between Will and himself.

And now...it's nearly time for her to go.

Hannibal walks silently to the bed. He kneels on it and he puts his arms around them both. Abigail cradled against Will's chest, hugged into Hannibal's. Hannibal holding Will. The two of them making a shield for her against everything they couldn't protect her from in life.

"I love you," Hannibal whispers. The "you" plural.

Will cherishes this moment. What he felt in pain and sadness has been addressed, after so long bearing it.

How long had he wished to hear Abigail say all of this to him? How long had he wished to be content in life, past discrepancies settled by spending even just a singular moment more with Abigail…? It feels refreshing—as it does painful. Because he knows that there is no ‘next time,’ not in this life. Then, Will isn't sure he believes in a next life to look forward to at all, even if Abigail is there.

But that's not where he needs to be right now. Right now, Hannibal is here– he can feel strong, familiar arms encompass both him and Abigail together as one. The three of them, content together for the first time in a very, very long time. Dreaming, hallucinating…Will doesn't care. He just cries, barely biting back a deep level of sobs as he nods even though he doesn't understand and he doesn't want to accept this reality just yet.

“I love you, too,” he shakily whispers, head tucked against Hannibal's chest, face in Abigail's hair. Warm, protected, he's trembling. His voice cracks something awful, one last anguished plea into the air: “P-Please don't leave me, Abigail… Please don't g-go.”

Abigail nearly screams with a sob, the ‘I love you’ so broken in return, muffled between Hannibal and Will. She knows better, and she knows that Hannibal knows better…but Will clings tightly. Hopes hard.

She can't blame him, but with what little time she has left here, she must put aside her own fears and needs and merely be a statue of love, a happy memory instead of a regretful nightmare. That's what _she_ wants.

“I have to g-go, I'm sorry–” she begins, the words barely coherent with her nonstop crying.“I'm s-so sorry, Will, Hannibal–”

It hurts to even say all of this, but if she's leaving, it's now or never, and she's fighting to get it all out, every last bit.

“I-I couldn't be the perfect daughter you b-both wanted–…fate had other plans. B-But…but you're both the best fathers I could've e-ever asked for. T-Thank you so much– f-for everything, I…”

When she shakily leans in to press a kiss to Will's cheek, she is fading. When she shakily leans in to pressa kiss to Hannibal's cheek, she is still fading.

This is the end. Her end. Finally.

“I l-love you.”

Then she's gone, and Hannibal is only holding Will.

For a long moment he leaves empty the space between them where she was. As if still feeling her insubstantial body there. As if waiting for her to come back.

Then he gathers Will close to him, as close as he can, presses his cheek against Will's, their tears flowing together, their living hearts beating in time.

This is Abigail's gift to them: each other.


End file.
